His biographer, Diana Holman-Hunt, believes that Guevara met Edith Sitwell by early 1914 and that she made an ‘extraordinary impression’ on him.3 She says that he much preferred the romantic qualities of her early poetry to the violence of Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists. Moreover, he found her personally captivating. I have not found evidence to confirm such an early date for their meeting, but it is possible, as Edith Sitwell had met a good many artists by then, some of them through Sickert, and some through Constance Lane, who, like Guevara, was a student at the Slade School before the war.
Guevara was a handsome man with a muscled physique often displayed in the ring – he became the champion of all weights in South America in 1924. An accomplished dancer, he probably tried to teach Edith Sitwell to tango. It is hard to imagine such a thing, as it brings to mind a scene from Addams Family Values. However, it was one of Guevara’s passions. He wrote plays and poetry, and a few of his translations appeared in Wheels, as did his illustrations. He came often to Pembridge Mansions, and in the summer of 1916 painted her portrait there. The Editor of Wheels is remarkable not least for its perspective; it looks down to its subject, seated on an Omega Studio dining chair. Sitwell wears a long green dress in a medieval mode, and the rough boards beneath her feet are partly covered by chequered mats. Guevara seems to have been the first of many artists fascinated by her long hands, which, resting on her lap, lend to the image a strange serenity.4
Edith Sitwell fell in love with Álvaro de Guevara. She told Allanah Harper, whom she met in 1925, that they had actually been engaged until someone warned her that he suffered from a serious venereal disease. This claim is always dismissed as Sitwell’s wishful thinking. Harold Acton, who believed her the one true genius in her family, described Edith Sitwell to John Pearson as ‘a sex-starved spinster all her life. She really desperately needed someone to take her to bed, but I’m sure that no one ever did. Certainly if it did happen – which I doubt – he was an extremely courageous gentleman … dear Edith wasn’t exactly what you might call cuddly.’5 Acton knew her well and honoured her as a poet, although one hesitates to rely on his idea of what is ‘cuddly’. Moreover, the ‘sex-starved spinster’ is a stereotype that is not much help in understanding her.
It is essential to be cautious in dealing with Sitwell’s claims about her personal history, but it is another thing to be casually dismissive. No letters, diaries, or other contemporary evidence about this relationship have come to light. No one knows what passed between Edith Sitwell and Álvaro de Guevara. When she was about seventy, she wept before her secretary Elizabeth Salter because, she said, she had never had a passionate relationship and felt that she was built for it.6 Nevertheless, that does not preclude an engagement or fleeting sexual experiences. According to Holman-Hunt, Guevara was a man of machismo; he tended to divide women into two categories: those you could have easy sex with (many) and ‘ladies’ you might consider marrying (few). He was very anxious to find a wife; virginity would have been in Edith’s favour. Writing nearly sixty years after the events, Holman-Hunt gives no source to back up her unqualified assertion that he did not propose to Edith Sitwell. Indeed, Holman-Hunt’s readiness to distinguish a ‘rare and exalted friendship’ from romantic love invites scepticism. She insists that the story of the venereal disease was someone making mischief between them.7 However, when he eventually married Meraud Guinness in 1929, it was after a secret engagement. It is not impossible that there was once a private understanding between himself and Sitwell that soon came unravelled.
A marriage would have been disastrous. Chile was promiscuous, with a taste for prostitutes of both sexes. Despite his gentle ways in conversation, he could be thuggish. Examples of brawling abound, including an apparent attempt in Paris to throw the admittedly provoking Brian Howard – the writer and aesthete upon whom Waugh’s Anthony Blanche is modelled – from a hotel window. He survived (so it is said) by holding the curtains and crawled back in. Guevara threw him a second time and he clung to the sill. Holman-Hunt remarks cheerfully of Guevara, ‘At least he had avoided prosecution for manslaughter or attempted murder.’8 In addition to his violent nature, Guevara had a taste for opium, about which he later had a row with Sachie.9 He was hardly a boy to take home, especially to such a mother as Lady Ida.
Sitwell looked on bitterly when Chile became involved with Nancy Cunard. He had known her since about 1914, when her friends Iris Tree and Lady Diana Manners were both studying at the Slade. Along with Osbert and others, they formed what was called ‘the corrupt coterie’. Nancy and Chile were sleeping together around the end of 1915 but seem to have drifted apart. Nancy had affairs with a number of young men who were headed for the Front; one romance, with Peter Broughton Adderley, lasted just five days before he went back to France and was killed.10 In November 1916, she married a Grenadier Guard from Australia named Sydney Fairbairn, and went on to spend about twenty unhappy months with him. In the autumn of 1919, Guevara began a portrait of Nancy and fell in love with her. He asked her to marry him, but she refused. When pressed, she explained that she was sleeping with various men. Her answer, a jolt to his Latin pride, shamed him. He thought little of his own promiscuity but was horrified by the same conduct in a woman. Some part of this story got back to Edith Sitwell and confirmed that as a lover Chile was lost to her; however, as late as 1927 she recommended him to Gertrude Stein as a ‘real genius’ and ‘one of my greatest friends’.11 On the other hand, Sitwell never lost an opportunity to speak ill of Cunard.
Edith Sitwell first met with Aldous Huxley at the Isola Bella restaurant in Soho – a haunt of many writers including the Imagist poet Hilda Doolittle (‘H.D.’) – on a June day in 1917: ‘The air was like white wine, spangled with great stars of dew and sun motes.’ In the cool of the restaurant, she sat with the tall, thin Huxley, whose ‘silences seemed to spread for miles, extinguishing life when they occurred, as a snuffer extinguishes a candle’. She had come to solicit work for Wheels and in the process began a lasting friendship. Though daunting, he was friendly and an accomplished talker. She met often with him and his first wife Maria. He would speak of animals and minerals as if they possessed a human lewdness. One of his monologues concerned the sex life of melons, so carnal, even incestuous, that gardeners kept them under glass. Once, in the tube station at Sloane Square, he held other travellers spellbound as he talked about the sexual dexterity of the octopus.12
Huxley was not sure at first what he was getting involved in and was doubtful of the Wheels coterie. In a letter to his brother Julian in August, he referred first to The Egoist, a modernist journal which published portions of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, as a ‘horrid little paper’ and then looked further down his nose:
I am also contributing to the well-known Society Anthology, Wheels, in company with illustrious young persons like Miss Nancy Cunard, Miss Iris Tree and the kindred spirits who figure in the gossip page of the Daily Mirror. This year, containing as it does, selections from me and Mr. Sherard Vines, it should be quite a bright production. The folk who run it are a family called Sitwell, alias Shufflebottom, one sister and two brothers, Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell – isn’t that superb – each of them larger and whiter than the other. I like Edith, but Ozzy and Sachy are still rather too large to swallow. Their great object is to REBEL, which sounds quite charming; only one finds that the steps they are prepared to take, the lengths they will go are so small as to be hardly perceptible to the naked eye. But they are so earnest and humble … these dear solid people who have suddenly discovered intellect and begin to get drunk on it … it is a charming type.13
The Second Cycle of Wheels, when it appeared in December, contained nine of his poems and none of Nancy’s; the gossip page receded. Huxley’s view that real rebellion called for more than some members of the Wheels coterie were doing in 1917 is hard to dispute, but his comments do not hold up in relation to Edith Sitwell herself, who was developing into a daring and inventive poet. Before l
ong, he changed his mind and decided he liked Wheels for its combativeness. For her part, Edith Sitwell was quickly convinced of Aldous Huxley’s genius, and throughout her life preferred his work to that of most of their contemporaries, including Virginia Woolf.
At the same time that her friendship with Huxley was developing, another even more important one was taking root. In April 1917, Siegfried Sassoon was shot through the shoulder at the Battle of Arras and returned home from the Front. He had won the Military Cross for rescuing a wounded soldier in 1916, and was then recommended for the Victoria Cross in another action. His diaries show him both disgusted with war and, paradoxically, anxious to prove his valour. Having begun as a lyrical poet in the Georgian mode, he abandoned the patriotic assurances of Rupert Brooke, describing the trenches and battlefields with revulsion. The publication of The Old Huntsman in May 1917 established him as one of the most important younger poets. While in England he was a frequent visitor at Garsington Manor where Lady Ottoline Morrell had surrounded herself with conscientious objectors. He also kept the company of Robert Ross, the old friend of Oscar Wilde. Until his sudden death on 5 October 1918, Ross was a mentor to many literary homosexuals including Osbert Sitwell. Holding strong anti-war opinions, he carried about photographs of dead and wounded soldiers for the inspection of anyone who spoke too complacently of sacrifice. Ross introduced Sassoon and Osbert Sitwell.
The young Sassoon was bold: on one occasion he had driven forty Germans out of a trench single-handedly. Now he intended to take ‘Independent Action’ to stop the war. Encouraged by Morrell, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, H. W. Massingham (editor of The Nation), the writer John Middleton Murry, and others, he composed his well-known public protest: ‘I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.’ He claimed that the original war aims could now be achieved by negotiation and that the suffering of soldiers was being prolonged for other ends which were ‘evil and unjust’.14 That summer, his protest was published in The Times and a dozen other newspapers, and it was read out in the House of Commons. The army and the government had no desire to try a gallant officer for mutiny. Robert Graves persuaded Sassoon to stand before a medical board, which concluded that he was suffering from shell-shock and hospitalised him. Sassoon’s actions were honourable and idealistic, although after the Second World War he concluded that a negotiated peace in 1917 would have been unrealistic, as nothing could have prevented a recurrence of German aggression.15 Desperation for the war to end gave force to the claim, however naive, that the British government was wickedly prolonging the slaughter.
At the beginning of the year Sacheverell had joined Osbert in the Grenadiers. The family had done their best to keep him out of service altogether, with Lady Ida’s physician providing a certificate declaring him unfit. Sacheverell never saw combat, and it is thought that Osbert used his influence to keep him stationed at Chelsea Barracks. It is also possible that the Grenadiers were slow to trust Osbert Sitwell’s brother. Sachie, who had nothing to do with the scandal, may have been viewed with undeserved scepticism by his commanders.
In the meantime, Edith Sitwell, anxious for the safety of her brothers, was dazzled by Sassoon’s protest. Through Robert Ross, she tracked him to Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh, where he had recently met another patient, the younger soldier-poet Wilfred Owen. On 30 August 1917 she wrote a letter to him on behalf of herself and her brothers: ‘we wish to write and tell you with what great sympathy – and envy – we regard your courage. It is very difficult to write a letter like this without appearing very stilted and lacking in a sense of humour … I expect all the old gentlemen are ever so pleased that you are a poet; it gives them the opportunity of jumping on two vices at the same time.’16
That the war was something old men inflicted on young men made sense to the Sitwells, who were so disillusioned with their own parents. After the death of his son at Loos, even Kipling wrote among his ‘Epitaphs of the War’ (1919): ‘If any question why we died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied.’ Yet the idea that by 1917 the war was animated by ‘evil and unjust’ aims led to a somewhat distasteful search for villains. Sassoon believed, as did many others, that the war continued because of a conspiracy among politicians, generals, and profiteers. His father’s family were Sephardic, but even Sassoon complained of ‘Jew profiteers’.17 For many ‘progressive’ thinkers the collocation seemed natural; for them, the epitome of the profiteer was the international arms salesman Basil Zaharoff of Vickers Ltd, makers of the Maxim machine gun. In a portrait of him, Osbert reminds the reader that he is a Jew and then writes of ‘the beaky face, the hooded eye, the wrinkled neck, the full body, the impression of physical power and of the capacity to wait, the sombre alertness’ of a vulture.18 This description of Zaharoff is quoted without demur by the ODNB in its most recent revision. Graham Greene based a character on Zaharoff in A Gun for Sale, and later revised the portrait to remove traces of anti-Semitism. He explained that before the Holocaust ‘one regarded the word Jew as almost a synonym for capitalist. Big business seemed our enemy and such men who happened to be Jewish as Zaharoff who indulged in the private sale of arms.’19
Edith Sitwell ventured into this territory in 1917 or early 1918 with her poem ‘Plutocracy at Play’. It is an obscure piece about the rich attending concerts, where ‘Eyes glitter like the scales of fish / With some half-formed Hebraic wish’. She continues:
… pastoral life befits their rank
With field of commerce, marbled bank,
Where seated the Eternal Nose
Finds out the worm within their rose:
‘Let those exalted be brought low’ –
And noses follow suit you know […]20
While large noses were a sensitive point for Sitwell, this is a disparagement not just of wealth and power but of a race. Published in 1918, ‘Plutocracy at Play’ was not reprinted. Indeed, Edith Sitwell’s poems about the war otherwise stay out of the bog of anti-Semitism.
Not all of Sitwell’s new friends shared her pacifism or, indeed, her opinions about poetry. Edmund Gosse was a disappointed poet who became the most influential critic and literary historian of his time. He was knighted in 1925.21 As a young man, he had been a friend of Tennyson, Rossetti, Stevenson, and Swinburne. Osbert first met Gosse through Robbie Ross in 1916. Gosse invited the Sitwells to his Sunday-afternoon tea parties. A knock at his door would be answered by Parker, the parlourmaid, whose authority in the house was second only to that of Buchanan, the cat, whom Gosse summoned to family meals with a bell. Edith Sitwell recalled that the cat had his own writing paper and envelopes, and that when Gosse was travelling he would dictate gossipy letters to him.22
Gosse had a ferocious style of conversation: like Samuel Johnson, he talked to win. Osbert compared him to a boxer or a fencer.23 He was also touchy; when he and his wife paid a visit to the Sitwells in January 1918, he brought a set of his new edition of Swinburne. Sachie expressed delight that the poems were now available in a cheap edition, to which he responded, ‘NOT SO CHEAP AS ALL THAT.’24 Edith described his conversation as a ‘treasure’ but never ‘was any treasure-seeking in the world more fraught with danger’.25 He was nevertheless supportive of young writers and easily charmed. Osbert says that they were invited to Gosse’s house for dinner one evening, when bombs began falling in the first big raid of the war. (Zeppelins had been bombing London since 1915, but Osbert may be referring to the first massive raid by Gotha bombers on 13 June 1917.) Edith did not appear, and Parker eventually announced: ‘Miss Sitwell has telephoned. She sends her compliments, but says she refuses to be an Aunt Sally for the Germans, so she is not coming to dinner.’26 The Gosses found the message enchanting. On another occasion, the Sitwells left after a bruising afternoon of debate. Gosse saw them to the door himself and called after them with a wave, ‘“Good-bye, you delightful but deleterious trio!”’27
I have been dragged into promising to preside at a reading of poets got up by Mrs Coalbox and Madam Fan-the-Devil, who would talk any human being into anything. I don’t know what I have let myself in for, but at all events some sound ‘Georgians’ will be represented – Nichols, Graves, Sassoon. But the protagonists are Edith and Osbert Sitwell, of whom I know nothing. I pray Apollo that they be not pacifists. I told the two fiery ladies that I would leave the house, not to say the chair, if the names of Alfred Douglas or Ezra Pound are mentioned, but they swear their poets are perfectly respectable. (I nearly wrote ‘respectful’; I am sure they are not that!)28
At the same time, the little-known T. S. Eliot wrote to Pound: ‘I have been invited by female VANDERVELDE to contribute to a reading of POETS: big wigs, OSWALD and EDITH Shitwell, Graves (query, George?) Nichols, and OTHERS.’29 The reading was held on 12 December at the house in Onslow Square of the veteran lion-catcher Sybil Colefax. It was organised by Robbie Ross and Lalla Vandervelde, the wife of a Belgian politician. She was able to get what she wanted from Gosse because in 1917 affection for Belgians was still a great motivator. One hundred and fifty people attended, paying 10s 6d for their tickets as a fund-raiser for the Red Cross. As it turned out, the ‘sound “Georgians”’ were under-represented: Sassoon did not show, and Graves walked straight past the house while proposing marriage to Nancy Nicholson. As chairman, Gosse wasted no time: recitations started promptly at five since he had a dinner engagement at a quarter past six. T. S. Eliot hurried from his job at Lloyd’s Bank, but was unavoidably late, earning a public rebuke from Gosse when he took his place on the platform. Osbert was struck by Eliot’s courtesy, his features like an Aztec carving, and his eyes like those ‘of one of the greater cats’.30 Aldous Huxley thought that only he and Eliot read with dignity, that the Sitwells were nervous, and that Nichols was all too ‘thrusting’ in his efforts to be the leader among the young poets.31
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