Edith Sitwell’s friendship with Eliot grew quickly. She also won the confidence of his unstable wife Vivienne, who was then reaching the conclusion of her affair with Bertrand Russell, begun in the summer of 1915 during the first weeks of her marriage to Eliot. Sitwell certainly found her engaging and did her best to be sympathetic over the years, even when Vivienne was utterly irrational. His biographers show that Tom Eliot was not much of a husband. Psychologically fragile himself, he had a streak of misogyny in his thinking that separated spirit and flesh, and then associated women negatively with the flesh. However, only a few people had such a close view of the Eliots’ marriage as Edith Sitwell did, and she had no doubt that Eliot behaved well towards Vivienne in appalling circumstances. As she put it years later, ‘What that great man has suffered, nobody knows.’32 In the early days of their friendship, she felt a bond with Eliot and afterwards maintained that the ‘hyacinth girl’ passage of The Waste Land was based on her.33
Other women had similar reactions to Eliot. Virginia Woolf and, later, even Helen Gardner found him enthralling. However, Lyndall Gordon, one of his biographers, wonders about Eliot’s view of Sitwell in light of his misogyny: ‘Does hatred come from sexual failures, or suppressed affinities, or resentful envy? Another woman writer is called “Shitwell” – a reward for the affability which the eccentric aristocrats, Edith Sitwell and her brothers, offered Eliot when, a newcomer in London, he used to sit with them in dank tea-rooms that seemed to be papered with their tea-leaves.’34 It should be noted, in Eliot’s defence, that the schoolboy pun on the Sitwells’ name was used by Eliot, Pound, and Wyndham Lewis also at the expense of her brothers, so it cannot be a pure indication of revulsion for female flesh, even though there is ample evidence elsewhere that these three men took a dim view of women. Gordon rightly observes a ‘coterie misogyny’ among them that led to harsh comments on Lady Ottoline Morrell and others.35
Literary associations were important, but Sitwell needed to get her work out. Now thirty years old, she had to her credit one pamphlet of poems, another shared with Osbert, and various pieces in the Daily Mirror and Wheels. It was time for more substantial collections. The first of these was Clowns’ Houses, published by Blackwell on 9 June 1918. At forty pages it was still a ‘slim volume’, but at least it was a book. Moreover, she had found her way to the ‘glittering’ style. The first poem, ‘Fireworks’, announces the effect she is looking for:
… the night
Will weld this dust of bright Infinity
To forms that we may touch and call and see …
[…]
And, ’gainst the silk pavilions of the sea
I watch the people move incessantly
Vibrating, petals blown from flower-hued stars
Beneath the music-fireworks’ waving bars;
So all seems indivisible, at one:
The flow of hair, the flowers, the seas that run, –
A coloured floating music of the night
Through the pavilions of the Infinite.36
The theme of this poem is actually very traditional; though comprising oddly sorted images, it is still a search for a metaphysical unity. It is a mixture of Baudelaire and William Blake. The pavilions beside the sea are an evocation of Scarborough in her childhood, but she has gone for the effect of a kaleidoscope. In much of her poetry of the 1910s and 1920s she describes provincial towns and villages, squires and bumpkins, country fairs and parish churches, as in ‘Weathercocks’:
Like wooden bumpkin’s sun-round stare
Clocks seem, in new-washed air:
Bucolic round-faced clocks
That laugh at pirouettes
Of glittering weathercocks
Each preening as he sets
Clouds tumbling like striped coloured clowns
Through all the far blue towns
With thunder drumming after.
A coloured bubble is the world –
A glassy ball that clowns have hurled
Through the rainbow space of laughter.37
The fascination with clowns and acrobats and, elsewhere, harlequins and the stock characters of commedia dell’arte may indicate a debt to Picasso. Indeed, in her fascination with surfaces and with a multiplicity of viewpoints, Sitwell may be attempting a Cubism in words. Her refusal to offer a reliable, even comforting, persona seems to have bothered some critics. The poem ‘Acrobats’ opens with a quotation from the journal The Literary World: ‘Edith Sitwell tries all manner of spiritual contortions with no great success. We suggest it is because she is too self-conscious.’ Her poem debunks the kind of ‘sincerity’ that had been expected of poets since the days of the Romantics:
O world! Fat woman ambling, with your hair
Blond as the locks of Fortune, or the stare
Of opulent suns, – your tights are thought to be
Pink flesh itself, and youth’s simplicity.
The key phrase here is ‘thought to be’. At the poem’s end Edith Sitwell returns to this image and asks bluntly:
Yet why should poets be constrained to bare
Mock souls, fat Acrobatics at a Fair,
In pink tights, imitative flesh; their goal
To be admired for fatted weight of Soul?38
Even though a special degree of earnestness was often expected of female poets, Sitwell seems to have grasped a point that eluded many poets and reviewers of the day: that the self in a poem is a performance, at times a tumbling act. To make a similar point, Pound used the metaphor of the persona and Eliot spoke of the flight from personality. Sitwell offered no philosophical account for her view, but she is in the mainstream of literary modernism. Even in the phrase ‘fatted weight of Soul’ she refuses the sort of quick transcendence served up by the minor heirs of the romantic tradition – what T. E. Hulme dismissed as ‘spilt religion’.
Edith Sitwell’s own ambitions as a poet were always matched by a search for genius in others. On 3 July 1918, Sassoon wrote to Osbert Sitwell: ‘Have you met Wilfred Owen, my little friend, whose verses were in The Nation recently? He is so nice, & shy, & fervent about poetry, which he is quite good at, & will do very well some day.’39 Osbert had, in fact, met him the previous September through Robert Ross, who asked the larger-than-life Sitwell ‘not to frighten him’.40 In July 1918, Owen was stationed at Scarborough, where books by the Sitwells were not popular. He wrote to Osbert about his tangles with the seaside booksellers:
Last week I broke out of camp to order Wheels, 1917. Canning refused to stock copies. I persisted so long that the Young Lady loudly declared she knew all along I was ‘Osbert himself’. This caused a consternation throughout the crowded shop; but I got the last laugh by – ‘No madam; the book is by a friend of mine, Miss Sitwell.’
Rigby’s people would not order a single copy without deposit!
Is the 1918 vol. designed to go on the caterpillar wheels of Siegfried’s Music Hall Tank? If so I might help with the ammunition. Would you like some short war poems, or what? Please give me a final date for submitting them to you.41
Although Owen refers to Edith as ‘a friend of mine’, the two never met. He was returned to the Front in September and soon led troops in a storming of enemy positions at the village of Joncourt. On 4 November, a week before the war’s end, he was killed at the Sambre–Oise Canal and was posthumously awarded the Military Cross for his valour at Joncourt.
Over the next two years, Edith Sitwell regarded it as almost a religious mission to get his poems into print. In February 1919, Osbert obtained the manuscripts from Owen’s mother, Susan Owen, with whom Edith exchanged a number of letters: ‘I write with the kind of reverence and humility with which I should have written to Dante’s mother.’42 With Sachie’s help, she transcribed the various poems, which still had on them the mud of the trenches, and she expected to have a final manuscript ready by October: ‘You cannot think what it means to me that you should allow me to see to his book; I think it is the greatest and most sacred honour. I have to
copy out the poems one by one and slowly, as frankly they upset me so terribly I often have to stop.’43 She wrote to Sassoon for help unravelling the texts of the last two poems; he appeared at Moscow Road, insisting that as Owen’s friend he should take over the publication. She told Susan Owen, ‘In those circumstances I could do nothing but offer to hand them over to him; though it has cost me more to relinquish them than I can tell you.’44
On the eve of the anniversary of Owen’s death she wrote to Susan Owen again: ‘All my thoughts are with you today, and will be tomorrow, unceasingly. If only one could express what one feels, ever. My heart aches for you. I am dumb when I think what not only you, his mother, but we all, have lost. I shall keep the 4th of November always, as long as I live, as a day of mourning. I know you are broken-hearted, but oh, you are just the mother for such a son. Tomorrow, his first poems in book form will be with you – the immortality of his great soul.’45 Sitwell was referring to the Fourth Cycle of Wheels which, dedicated to Owen, contained ‘Strange Meeting’, ‘A Terre’, ‘The Sentry’, ‘Disabled’, ‘The Dead-Beat’, and ‘The Chances’. Only four of his poems had been published in his lifetime. In the months following his death, the Sitwells had arranged publications of some individual poems, but this was the first time that Owen’s work appeared in bulk. John Middleton Murry observed in the Athenæum (5 December 1919) that by including ‘Strange Meeting’ ‘the editor of “Wheels” has done a great service to English letters’.
In January 1919, Sassoon headed off to the United States for an eight-month reading tour. He returned the manuscripts to Edith Sitwell to be made ready for delivery by 1 February. According to Sitwell’s report to Susan Owen, he had done nothing with them in the interim apart from finding a publisher.46 She got the last of the editing done (Susan Owen had sent more poems since September) and delivered the manuscript to Frank Swinnerton at Chatto & Windus. The volume of Owen’s work that appeared in the autumn contained Sassoon’s introduction and an acknowledgment: ‘For the preparation of this book thanks are primarily due to Miss Edith Sitwell.’47 Although this note appeared as the first thing in the book after the half-title, Sitwell remained unhappy that her role as Owen’s first editor was generally overlooked.
In the fourth cycle of Wheels (1919), Edith Sitwell published a group of poems by Wilfred Owen, who had been killed in action in the last days of the war
For a time, Sitwell shared Edmund Gosse’s view that the poet Robert Nichols was a sure thing. A friend of Sassoon and Graves, Nichols served briefly at the Front, and his volume Ardours and Endurances (1917) was widely praised. He wrote a series of episodes from the trenches, which, raw and memorable, suffer by comparison only with the best poetry the war produced. Although Sitwell and Gosse hoped his development would continue, Nichols turned out to be a poet of authentic but not extraordinary gifts, briefly galvanised by a terrible subject. A few years after the war, he was essentially finished as a poet, though he continued to write drama and fiction. W. H. Davies once remarked in a penetrating way: ‘Robert Nichols wants me to give him lessons in writing sonnets … But you know, you can’t teach a mun to write sonnets.’48
Nichols first came to Pembridge Mansions in October 1917. He and Edith Sitwell had a close friendship for about two years, and she wrote him fulsome letters: ‘Why do you say you will “only attempt side glances”? The only Prometheus we have got, pretending he is frightened of fire.’ Apart from such earnestness, one hears emerging Sitwell’s characteristic voice as a letter-writer: ‘God, I am so bored with nearly everything; have had a horrible week, pursued by virtuous female cousins like very large empty omnibuses on very small wheels, who live in drawing rooms like railway carriages – only one never gets anywhere, even to a terminus.’ In August 1918, she complained to Nichols from Renishaw that she was surrounded by her mother, her father, and her duty, ‘rather an uncomfortable ménage à trois’. The food was bad and she was afflicted by the attentions of a pony:
I sustain a nymph-like existence by splashing among the muddy streams of watered coffee which flow at breakfast time. My mother has a pony which thinks it is a Pekinese and tries to sit on one’s lap; it has a glassy eye, and I am absolutely terrified of it; and, though no athlete, fly for miles pursued by its affections and cries of ‘Your grandfather was such a sportsman! I can’t imagine what makes you like this.’
In her next letter, she spoke of a living toad that had been found in a coal seam a few years earlier. It was thought to have been there for two or three million years ‘with nothing to look at and nobody to talk to. As Sachie remarks, the first million years must have seemed a bit long. Well, only that toad could even attempt to enter into my agonies, though with only partial success, as at least he had silence. With his advantage in that direction, I should have written better poems.’ Meanwhile, her father was ‘too marvellously fantastic, so Italian Comedy, I expect him to break into tail-feathers at any moment’. She tried to play the piano, but ‘jellified females would melt over me’. Ginger wept over her music and offered the back-handed compliment, ‘Oh, my darling, every girl should have some talent or other.’ Meanwhile she noticed among his books one intended for her, titled ‘How to be Pleasing, though Plain’.49 This is all great fun, but it is well to remember that Sitwell’s letters are often a kind of comic fiction. The title that she mentions never made its way to Britain’s copyright libraries.
On Boxing Day 1918, she wrote to Nichols from Scarborough and said that she had been discussing religion with Margaret Nevinson, a writer and suffragette, and the mother of the painter C. R. W. Nevinson: ‘It makes me feel more and more as though one day I shall become a Roman Catholic. (It is the only creed for someone like myself, I do feel that more and more.)’50 Pious but disaffected from the Church of England, Edith Sitwell was influenced by Helen Rootham (whose interest in the esoteric may have complicated the issue) and even perhaps by Robert Ross, another Catholic. Although the theology of her work is indisputably Catholic from about 1940 – explicit allusions to Thomas Aquinas can be traced in the notes to her Collected Poems – she did not finally enter the Church until 1955. She usually tried to deflect talk about her personal faith, and some of her wisecracks encouraged friends to think the conversion either a passing fancy or a failed attempt to contain her bad temper by submission to higher authority. In fact, she had pondered conversion for almost forty years, and once she did convert she remained a communicant until her death in 1964.
Nichols took a professorship in Japan in 1921 and then went to Hollywood where he advised Douglas Fairbanks, Senior, on the finer points of swashbuckling. In 1930, he read Osbert’s short story ‘Alive – Alive O’ and assumed that he was being satirised in the figure of a war poet who fakes his own death to achieve a Keatsian fame. Eddie Marsh thought that if the character named ‘Bundle’ resembled anyone, it was Edmund Blunden, but Nichols was offended and started a feud with Osbert.51 Afterwards Edith thought him fit only for teasing.
10
ALICE IN HELL
I often see your photo in the Daily Mail; I think how wonderful you look. Do you remember me when you & Miss Rootham lived in Pembridge Mansions, Bayswater? & I supplied you with coal at Stubbs in Queen’s Rd. If you remember, you were the first two ladies to come along & shake hands with me when the Armistice was signed in the ‘First World War’. They were such happy days to me … If you are able to answer this letter, [I] should so much like to know how you are, & if you still see Miss Rootham.1
So wrote the seventy-three-year-old Ethel Grant in August 1964 to Dame Edith Sitwell, who was by then in the last months of her life. Helen Rootham had been dead for a quarter of a century. For almost everyone of their generation, 11 November 1918 had been a day of rejoicing. Sitwell and Rootham were on their way to the Eiffel Tower restaurant that afternoon, joining Osbert, Nina Hamnett, Aldous and Julian Huxley, and Dora Carrington.2 Then came a dinner party at Osbert’s house in Swan Walk, where Sachie joined them, with Lalla Vandervelde, Ethel Sands, the Russian i
mpresario Sergei Diaghilev, and the dancer and choreographer Léonide Massine. They made their way to Trafalgar Square where thousands danced and sang. In Whitehall, Nina Hamnett saw a man perched on a ladder, scraping the black paint from an arc light. Peace meant the relighting of the city.3
The Sitwells went to a party that night at the Adelphi, hosted by Monty Shearman and attended by the most of the Bloomsbury set: Hamnett, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Mark Gertler, Lady Ottoline Morrell, D. H. Lawrence, John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, and David Garnett. Diaghilev and Massine were joined by the ballerina Lydia Lopokova. After an evening of pianola music and dancing, one of the party-goers, on his way home, tried to set fire to Nelson’s plinth. Going back to Aldershot, Sachie saw drunken women rolled like milk cans along the platform at Waterloo Station and stowed in the guard’s van.4 The reign of peace began the next morning with a hangover and some bruises.
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