For some time, Sitwell’s poetry had been making the case that what seems to us a personal identity is, in fact, other people’s memories – a sense of the cultural and family past that shackles love, daring, and originality. What, then, was she to make of the myth she had herself inherited? Doubts about the whole question of personal identity led to her first and most interesting attempt at autobiography; the others were written when she was depressed and had scores to settle. Portions of this first memoir appeared in ‘Readers and Writers’, and I have quoted from it in earlier chapters of this book.31 She wrote about her family as the Dukes of Troy, but Sitwell’s Troy is unlike Homer’s. She explained to Robert Graves: ‘I had a Chinoiserie grandmother who came of a family which owned an old castle called “Troy Castle” in Wales … it was called after a game people played in the time of Elizabeth.’32 Perfectly suited for a mock epic, Troy House, near Monmouth, was the seat of her maternal ancestors the Dukes of Beaufort. The sword Henry V used at Agincourt was said to have been deposited there.33
The name of the house likely derives from a corruption of the name of the River Trothy,34 but it is better that Sitwell was mistaken. The game of Troy, which had nearly vanished by the nineteenth century, involved ceremonial movements in a maze35 – a fitting background for her narrative. Sitwell absorbs into her Troy Castle aspects of Renishaw. She honours the heroic past of ancestors going back to the Angevin kings, but finds that their heritage has little to do with modern life. The boldness one might learn from those otherwise barbaric figures is just the thing that gets stamped out in our own time. She wants to explode a kind of snobbery – ‘“Yesterday I lunched with Lady B …”’ – and instead assert an aristocracy of the spirit, and of intellect, and of authentic tradition.
In the first of her columns, she allows a ghostly version of herself to speak: ‘As a member of a family whose tradition is hunting (of the rare and of the unattainable), whose skill in falconry was used indiscriminately on the smallest song-birds and on a winged and blinded Fate, my grandmother insisted on the pursuit of health.’ The anti-climaxes remind the reader what has become of the tradition. The ghost never fully inhabits the life she is born to and grows more separate with the passage of time: ‘“everything seemed to hold some promise, I do not know of what; life seemed less a stranger than at any other time in my existence … I have always been a little outside life, and the things one could touch comforted me; for I am like a ghost, a dead person.”’ If she lived in the present, this woman would be chased into corners by ‘dwarfs on stilts … they would squeak like guinea pigs’.36
Unable to find a proper shape for the memoir, Sitwell had to give up on it; she told Robert Graves, ‘prose is not for me. I’m terrified of it as a medium.’37 Nevertheless she reworked some passages into poems, among them one of her best, ‘Colonel Fantock’, published in 1924:
Thus spoke the lady underneath the trees:
I was a member of a family
Whose legend was of hunting – (all the rare
And unattainable brightness of the air) –
A race whose fabled skill in falconry
Was used on the small song-birds and a winged
And blinded Destiny … I think that only
Winged ones know the highest eyrie is so lonely.
There in a land, austere and elegant,
The castle seemed an arabesque in music;
We moved in an hallucination born
Of silence, which like music gave us lotus
To eat …
Having eaten the lotus, children discover a delusive hope:
But Dagobert, Peregrine and I
Were children then; we walked like shy gazelles
Among the music of the thin flower-bells.
And life still held some promise, – never ask
Of what, – but life seemed less a stranger, then,
Than ever after in this cold existence.
I always was a little outside life –
And so the things we touch could comfort me;
I loved the shy dreams we could hear and see –
For I was like one dead, like a small ghost,
A little cold air wandering and lost.
A mother’s kiss in the prose memoir becomes in the poem that of a great-grandmother (skipping back over both Lady Ida and the Countess of Londesborough to a woman Sitwell hardly remembered and could not resent), and in that woman’s shadow appears Colonel Fantock, a character based on Sir George’s retainer Major A. B. Brockwell. Like the woman under the trees he is ‘outside life forever’; he boasts of old exploits, and ‘For us defended Troy from the top stair / Outside the nursery.’ In the prose memoir, his claims are punctured by the old governess Mademoiselle Blanchatte, but in the poem there is less venom and more sorrow:
But then came one cruel day in deepest June,
When pink flowers seemed a sweet Mozartian tune,
And Colonel Fantock pondered o’er a book.
A gay voice like a honeysuckle nook –
So sweet, – said, ‘It is Colonel Fantock’s age
Which makes him babble’ … Blown by winter’s rage
The poor old man then knew his creeping fate,
The darkening shadow that would take his sight
And hearing; and he thought of his saved pence
Which scarce would rent a grave … That youthful voice
Was a dark bell which ever clanged ‘Too late’ –
A creeping shadow that would steal from him
Even the little boys who would not spell –
His only prisoners … On that June day
Cold Death had taken his first citadel.38
Both the woman under the trees and Colonel Fantock have seen past a façade of stories; on the other side are littleness and death. The wisdom of this poem was hard won for Edith Sitwell, for she often took refuge in just the kind of snobbery that is debunked here – and, as an old woman, she fell into Fantock’s trap of using tall tales to fend off a sense of diminishment.
Edith Sitwell left the New Age much as she had come in – complaining about a review of Wheels. A former contributor to the anthology, the poet and translator Paul Selver, found much to praise in the preceding Cycles, but found the sixth unnecessarily obscure. His review came out on 19 October 1922; Sitwell immediately sent in a letter saying she would not write again for the magazine.39 However, it had been nearly a month since her last piece had appeared. During that time Orage had handed over the New Age to a new editor, Major Arthur Moore, who perhaps did not want her back. Sitwell probably seized on the Selver review as an opportunity to retreat with covering fire.
After his appearance at the Anglo-French Poetry Society in April 1922, Robert Graves became, for a few years, a friend of Edith Sitwell’s. He and his wife, Nancy Nicholson, were then living in tight circumstances at Islip, north-east of Oxford, following the failure of Nancy’s shop at Boar’s Hill. In Sitwell’s account of one particular visit, Graves rode his bicycle to the station to meet her. With his arm injured from rugby, he could not carry her suitcase, which contained books, manuscripts, and an eighteenth-century brocade coat. They tried to prop it on the bicycle, but it came crashing down, and Sitwell was obliged to lug it herself. Graves remarked that it was nice to see a ‘fine strapping woman who could carry her own suitcase’. She was not pleased.
Along the way Graves cleared his throat and said, ‘“Look here, Edith (pause), you leave Nancy alone and she’ll leave you alone. See. She’ll be alright if you are alright. But don’t try anything on with her, because she won’t stand for it. D’you understand?”’ Quaking, she continued with him to the house where Nancy greeted her pleasantly but timidly. Before going to the station, Graves had said to his wife, ‘“Look here, Nancy, you leave Edith alone and she’ll leave you alone. See. She’ll be alright if you are alright. But don’t try anything on with her, because she won’t stand for it. D’you understand?”’ Although Sitwell hardly took a traditional view of the
role of women, she was not at ease with Nancy: ‘She was intensely anxious that no woman, however tiresome, should be quelled … What did a man’s art, his work, matter, if his hand could rock the cradle.’ Sitwell liked to quell tiresome women and much preferred art to cradles.
Nancy and Robert produced four babies in five years, and Sitwell seems to have visited them after the birth of the third, Catherine. Graves wrote: ‘It was a surprise, after reading her poems, to find her gentle, domesticated, and even devout. When she came to stay with us she spent her time sitting on the sofa and hemming handkerchiefs.’40 Graves struck Sitwell as something of a ‘high wind … With one hand he made up the kitchen fire, with the other he played with the children, or fried the eggs, or made the toast’ and all the while he chatted about how the ideas of Freud could explain Shakespeare. When the noise of the children interrupted the flow of his ideas, he put his hands to his head and screamed at them. With Nancy out of the house, he carried two of them up the stairs, ‘much as a fox carries chickens’. Sitwell heard sounds of ‘tribulation’ and when Robert came down again, he said, ‘There is no need to worry Nancy with things like that.’41 Sitwell enjoyed the friendship of Robert Graves while it lasted, and she admired his work: ’When I read your poems, I so often think of a very clear lake, and looking down through the lake to some shining beauty very far below, but most clearly seen.’42
12
GERTRUDE
By the mid-1920s, Edith Sitwell had gripped the imaginations of many young writers, among them the eighteen-year-old Graham Greene, who declared himself converted to Sitwellism in March 1923. In April he invited her to read poems to the Balliol College Society of Modern Poetry and Drama. She turned him down, since she had to give other lectures and was getting ready for a performance of Façade at the Aeolian Hall, but a friendship was begun.1
Greene then read her new collection, Bucolic Comedies, published on 24 April 1923, and told his mother it was absolutely ‘out middle stump’. He wrote an essay on Sitwell’s work and sent it to the Weekly Westminster Gazette. The editor told him they had run enough on Edith Sitwell lately, but sent the piece directly on to her.2 She wrote to Greene on 15 June: ‘I am not used to people understanding anything whatever about my poetry, excepting perhaps an occasional image, and that only partially, as they do not understand the spiritual impulse behind the image. You have understood it all. Your comprehension appears to be absolutely complete. And this has given me the greatest possible pleasure.’3 By 29 June, Graham Greene was drinking tea at Pembridge Mansions.
Bucolic Comedies, the book that so excited Greene, contained a nineteen-poem version of Façade and other recent compositions. In the autumn of 1921, Sitwell had finally found a mainstream publisher. Gerald Duckworth (Virginia Woolf’s half-brother) ran a conservative firm, but Sitwell, soon joined by her brothers, added spark to their list. Her editor was Duckworth’s new partner, Thomas Balston. He stayed with the firm until 1934, and Sitwell regarded him as a close friend. Also in the early 1920s Sitwell threw in her lot with agents at Curtis Brown – first an old man named Henry Bounds, then his apprentice David Higham, whom she followed in 1935 into the breakaway firm of Pearn, Pollinger and Higham.4
A pugilist for the modern movement in the arts, Sitwell was often in demand as a speaker, and she could fill a room. On 8 May 1923, she debated with the poet Alfred Noyes at the London School of Economics to raise money for the Hospitals of London Appeal. Sitwell associated Noyes with J. C. Squire and once remarked that his work was like cheap linoleum: ‘they have the same kind of smoothness.’5 Edmund Gosse, the chairman, asked Noyes beforehand to take it easy: ‘“Do not, I beg of you, use a weaver’s beam on the head of poor Edith.”’ Noyes did win the opening round. Sitwell, wearing gold laurels, asked if she could bring her supporters to the platform; Noyes agreed on the condition that he could bring his. When asked who they were, he answered blandly, ‘“Oh, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and a few others.”’ Sitwell opened her lecture, ‘In their day, Keats and Shelley were the most persecuted of poets, and Tom Moore was the most popular. In our days, my brothers and I are the most persecuted of poets, and,’ pointing an accusing finger at her opponent, ‘Mr Noyes …’ At that point laughter drowned out her words. She went on to deliver a scripted talk on how all great poets are innovators in their time and that she was glad to join them in the asylum to which their contemporaries assigned them. Noyes ad-libbed a rebuttal that true poetry is contemporary in all ages. Once they were finished, Gosse said, ‘Come along, Edith. I have no doubt that in his day Shakespeare was thought to be mad.’6
On 12 June, the revised Façade was given a public performance. Osbert took the stage at the Aeolian Hall in New Bond Street at 3.15 to explain to the audience the novel aspects of the work, especially how the curtain was intended to remove the reciter’s personality from the performance. However, to the audience clutching programmes headed ‘Osbert Sitwell Presents Miss Edith Sitwell in “Façade”’, the personalities were inescapable. This version had twenty-seven numbers, and the orchestra now included a saxophone.7 Osbert recalled some applause but also hissing – mainly from the front rows. At the end, Edith was told to remain behind the curtain until the hostile crowd dispersed.8 She remembered that she was pursued by a ‘sex maniac’, whom Sachie tried to drive off with a good kick, and that there was an old woman with an umbrella, ready to thump and poke the artists.9 William Walton said that the concert nearly led to fisticuffs,10 but his friend, the pianist Angus Morrison, thought that their recollections were exaggerated and that not much happened apart from Noël Coward ostentatiously walking out.11
For the Sitwells, the concert was a perfect demonstration of philistinism. Walton thought rather that they had brought it on themselves: the event was disorganised and the music poorly performed.12 Virginia Woolf sat ‘dazed’, listening to Edith Sitwell ‘vociferating through the megaphone’. She continued, ‘I should be describing Edith Sitwell’s poems, but I kept saying to myself “I don’t really understand … I don’t really admire.”’13 Others, though, had a different reaction. Constant Lambert was in the audience and found the work intriguing. He soon met Walton, and became an indispensable part of the enterprise. He collaborated with Walton on the music for ‘Four in the Morning’, and soon became Façade’s most accomplished reciter. On many occasions, he was the conductor of Frederick Ashton’s ballet of Façade (1931), a work with which Sitwell herself was not involved.
The press for the Aeolian Hall performance was bad. ‘Drivel They Paid to Hear’ was the headline to one review, which went on to congratulate Coward on his walk-out and to report the fireman’s opinion that he had seen nothing like it in his twenty years at the hall.14 Most of the other reviews repaid the efforts of Sitwell and Walton with a harrumph. One exception was Gerald Cumberland, writing in Vogue: ‘To this hour I am by no means certain what some of her poems mean, but if I do not understand their beauty, I divine it, and for that reason am all the more attracted, drawn, seduced.’15
Coward lampooned the Sitwells as the Swiss Family Whittlebot and Edith, in particular, as Hernia Whittlebot, in London Calling, a show that opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre on 4 September. Coward had the knack of Sitwell utterance: ‘Life is essentially a curve and Art is an oblong within that curve. My brothers and I have been brought up on Rhythm as other children are brought up on Glaxo.’16 The Whittlebots were briefly more famous than the Sitwells, as Coward introduced them into gossip columns and radio broadcasts. He put out a privately printed volume of Hernia’s verses, followed by ‘Chelsea Buns’, clunking pastiches of Edith Sitwell’s. Sitwell was humiliated by an imputation that Hernia was a lesbian – there is, for example, a punning tribute ‘To a Maidenhair Fern’, as well as references to the groping of breasts and to ‘virulent hermaphrodites’.17 When Coward received an angry letter from Osbert, he thought it was a joke. Coward wrote an apology to Edith in late 1926. On the advice of Siegfried Sassoon, she sent a curt rep
ly:
Another caricature by Max Beerbohm of Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell (1925)
Dear Mr. Coward,
I accept your apology.
Yours sincerely,
Edith Sitwell18
She kept a close eye on him nonetheless. When he sought to reprint the ‘indecent and offensive’ verses in 1932, she had her solicitor send a letter to the publisher. She also obtained an opinion from counsel specialising in libel; he was ready to go to court, provided she could pay a retainer of one thousand pounds. She asked Sir George for the money, who must have balked,19 but as it turned out the publisher was scared off. No reprint appeared. Until they were reconciled more than forty years later, Edith Sitwell very simply hated Noël Coward.
In 1923, Sitwell found an unlikely friend. John Freeman, a Georgian poet and winner of the Hawthornden Prize, struck up a correspondence with her in the spring. She was quick to say that she admired his work but had at first distrusted it because his name so often appeared in company with that of J. C. Squire and Edward Shanks.20 A Methodist preacher, Freeman lived on a different planet from Sitwell, but they found common ground in the music halls. Sitwell asked: ‘Have you ever seen Nellie Wallace? In her own way she is an extremely fine artist, – one of the only fine artists on the English stage. She is an extraordinary mime, has great personality, and has the most significant appearance I’ve seen in an English actress. Everything acts: her cheeks (which she flaps as though they were being blown by a wind, when she cries), her hands, her feet, her body. She is very tragic, though she is a low-comedy actress: the epitome of starvation.’ Sitwell also wrote to Freeman about the brothers Fratellini:
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