Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  If you remember, they are the clowns whom Cocteau engaged to play in Shakespeare, and great French painters are always painting and drawing them … I saw them in a lovely shooting scene like something out of Stravinski’s ‘Chansons Plaisantes’. There was a twittering of birds, the clowns shot into the air, and down tumbled showers of carrots and turnips and onions, and one very large fish, – in fact everything countrified excepting a bird. – But one can’t describe it; it has to be seen. I hope and believe you would like them as much as I did. For I, also, never go to the theatre, excepting to a Mozart opera, or certain Russian operas, or the Russian ballet. But music-halls delight me, and circuses still more.21

  Sitwell spent much of the second half of 1923 on the continent, first in Paris, then in Amalfi, in both places working on The Sleeping Beauty, a long sequence of poems that must have owed something to Diaghilev’s production of The Sleeping Princess at the Alhambra in 1921.22 Cyril Connolly thought this was Sitwell’s best work and that it was indebted to Ravel, a suggestion Sitwell confirmed.23 She said in Taken Care Of that the atmosphere of the poem was Londesborough; the dowager queen was modelled on her great-grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Beaufort (since she could have had no recollection of this woman, Sitwell was probably thinking of her grandmother the Countess of Londesborough); the maid Malinn was based on a servant at Londesborough, and the cross housekeeper Poll Troy on Louisa Sitwell’s servant Leckley.24 There is even an appearance by one of Sitwell’s childhood pets, a dog named Dido. However, the poem belongs as much to fantasy as to autobiography. It was partly inspired by Oriental art, especially the eighteenth-century Japanese artist Ogata Korin, who worked in paint and lacquer, and achieved a remarkably idealised style.25 Sitwell quietly invites the reader to imagine the world of the poem as if rendered by this master:

  At Easter when red lacquer buds sound far slow

  Quarter-tones for the old dead Mikado,

  Through avenues of lime-trees, where the wind

  Sounds like a chapeau chinois, shrill, unkind –

  The Dowager Queen, a curling Korin wave

  That flows forever past a coral cave,

  With Dido, Queen of Carthage, slowly drives

  (Her griffin dog that has a thousand lives)

  Upon the flat-pearled and fantastic shore

  Where curled and turbaned waves sigh, ‘Never more.’

  At the time, Sitwell was seeing everything through Oriental art. In November she wrote to Graham Greene, sending him a section of The Sleeping Beauty to publish in a magazine he edited; she described Amalfi: ‘It has been heavenly here, and this is the most beautiful place in the world, – very fantastic and Chinoiserie … Like a Korin painting.’26

  In The Sleeping Beauty, Sitwell includes an unsettling lullaby:

  Do, do,

  Princess, do,

  The fairy Chatte Blanche rocks you slow.

  Like baskets of white fruit or pearls

  Are the fairy’s tumbling curls –

  Or lattices of roses white

  Where-through the snows like doves take flight.

  Do, do,

  Princess, do,

  How furred and white is the fallen snow.27

  The fairy reminds us of the governess Mademoiselle Blanchatte, who crushed Colonel Fantock. Here her job is to induce the sleep of adult consciousness. For Sitwell, the task of poetry is to awaken the reader from such a coma. Yet in the poem, the young woman at the age of sexual awakening pricks her finger on the spindle and enters a darkness from which, at the end of the sequence, she has not awoken; she has learnt caution.

  Duckworth released the book in March. In a sign of Sitwell’s new commercial heft, it was picked up by Alfred A. Knopf and published in the United States in August. The reviews were respectful. Robert Graves in the Nation and Athenæum described it as a visit to ‘Looking-Glass-Land’, observing that it ‘has the inconsequent but powerful movement of a dream, and is strewn with memorable images’.28 Writing in the TLS, Edgell Rickword found much to admire, but felt that there was a technical flaw in the repetition of certain images. He praised her thoughtfulness and intellectual awareness, and remarked: ‘The considered audacity with which she de-animises nature in her imagery expresses very effectively the way in which the shades of the prison house close round the growing princess.’29 E. M. Forster, whom she had not met, sent a letter praising the book. This was especially gratifying as she believed Forster was the best novelist of their generation.30

  In late 1923 Sitwell was absorbed in The Waste Land, while its author, following a mental collapse in 1921 and sojourns at Lausanne and Margate, had disappeared from general view. On 21 March 1924, she reported to Graves that she had seen Tom Eliot for the first time in two years. Eliot told her that The Waste Land was a year’s work. ‘What a great poem it is … Tom says he considers the end of the book the best. It is wonderful – but then the whole poem is, I think, don’t you?’ Shortly after, she wrote: ‘I’m longing to discuss “The Waste Land” almost line by line, as I want to know if you read the same meanings into it as I do; or what other meanings you read into it.’31 John Freeman, on the other hand, thought the poem had no form; Sitwell tried to convince him by quoting a long stretch of Coleridge on the difference between organic and mechanic form, but in the end suggested that he talk to Robert Graves: ‘Apart from his pleasure at the meeting, he can argue and I can’t.’32

  Sitwell spent the winter of 1923–4 in Paris, returning to London in March for the release of her book. About this time, Sir George was making another addition to the Sitwell properties. He obtained from the estate of a maternal aunt Weston Hall, the Northamptonshire house, unoccupied since 1911, where Louisa Sitwell had grown up. It came into the family in the early 1700s when a remote ancestor, Sir John Blencowe, gave it to his widowed daughter Susanna Jennens as a Valentine’s Day present. In the 1740s, the poet Mary Leapor worked there as a kitchen-maid. For most of its history, it passed as a dower house along the female line, until Sir George decided it would be a good home for Sachie.33 Edith visited Weston often in the years to come, and her grave is located there.

  Edith found Weston’s library intriguing. She told Graves on 10 September that she had been looking at books of travel from around 1690 and found in one this description of the dodo: ‘He hath a mournful countenance and is much given to closing the eyes, as though he were in a Melancholy.’ From Sadducimus Triumphatus (1682), on the trials of witches, she read that Queen Elizabeth had once been prevented from visiting Scotland when a witch baptised a cat. Sitwell was especially interested in how another witch caused the favourite horse of a Mr Justice Mompesson to get his hind leg stuck irremovably in his mouth.34 She set about working some of these images into poems. One of them, about how the same Justice Mompesson was tortured by a demonic drumming noise in his house, provided the basis for ‘The Drum’, which opens later versions of Façade.

  Through 1923 and 1924, Edith Sitwell was trying to decide what she made of Gertrude Stein. In the summer of 1923, she wrote a cautious review of Geography and Plays, but in another review in October 1924, she said that after a year of hard work on Stein she had decided she had been guilty of an injustice and could now declare her to be ‘among the most important writers of the time’. Stein’s style was ‘strange, wild, fly-away; her words are like singing birds flying down upon a branch for a moment, together on the same bough, but to all appearance utter strangers to each other’. She believed that Stein could exercise a wide influence.35 Many years later, she qualified this view; Stein remained for her an important writer who had ‘revivified’ language, but no young writer should take her work as a model.36 Some would think the same thing true of Sitwell’s work.

  Duckworth released Troy Park in March 1925. It contained, among others, the autobiographical poems Sitwell had written after abandoning her memoir. Stephen Spender later judged this volume one of her most important.37 Sitwell’s own view of the book is captured in a letter to Robert Graves: ‘In “Tr
oy Park” I have found out definitely what I can and can’t do in poetry. And that is a most useful discovery. Several of the quiet poems in the book I simply can’t bear; and I now realise that (apart from “The Child who saw Midas,” “Colonel Fantock,” “An Old Woman Laments in Springtime,” “Mademoiselle Richarde” and “The Pleasure Gardens,” poems for which I cherish an affection), I am best when most swashbuckling.’38 She was right. Some of the quieter poems in the collection are sleep-inducing, but it also contained plenty of swashbucklers, such as ‘Four in the Morning’:

  Cried the navy-blue ghost

  Of Mr. Belaker

  The allegro negro cocktail shaker …39

  And ‘I do like to be beside the Seaside’:

  When

  Don

  Pasquito arrived at the seaside

  Where the donkey’s hide tide brayed, he

  Saw the banditto Jo in a black cape

  Whose slack shape waved like the sea …40

  Yet there were other remarkable poems, in a different vein. Around the end of 1923, Graves was writing poems about ghosts – this gave Sitwell the idea for ‘The Man with the Green Patch’.41 She described it thus: ‘Our Renishaw ghost is making its way into a new poem of mine. I’ll send it you when it is finished … it is a concrete ghost, though. – I’m doing quite a new kind of work. No colours, no gaiety, ever so grey and bony; always, of course, slightly mad, because I am. These new poems will probably get me lynched. But who cares? It is all in a day’s work.’42 When Graves saw the poem, he liked it. Sitwell wrote:

  You say that my ‘ass-ear grass’ and ‘hairy sky’ etc, terrify you, and you want to know what makes me do it. It is rather difficult to explain. I think it is that I have always been in two lives, – if you can understand what I mean. It’s a queer somnambulistic floating back from my own perilous life to other people’s safe one … and waking up with a scream. Perhaps subconsciously I wish I could get on friendly terms with the safe kind of life I hate, and am never able to do it. That is explaining badly, at once exaggeratedly and insufficiently, but you will see what I mean … a safe and material world.43

  In later years, Sitwell could never understand why young poets of the 1930s were credited with social awareness, when she had been writing about poverty and injustice for years. Her own finances were tight, and she lived in a slum. Part of the problem was that she was so aristocratic. Also, her criticism of society was Christian rather than Marxist – and in the first years of the next decade that would hardly seem a sophisticated model of social understanding. Nonetheless, the thin skin that caused her to believe she was at times persecuted also enabled her to imagine in terrible detail the sufferings of others. She described herself to her editor Tom Balston as ‘fundamentally kind, if you discount my conversation, which is very often not’.44 One area in which Troy Park excels is the observation of women who have no money, such as the ancient governess, Mademoiselle Richarde, living by proxy:

  A tiny spider in a gilded nut

  She lived and rattled in the emptiness

  Of other people’s splendours; her rich dress

  Had muffled her old loneliness of heart.

  This was her life; to live another’s part,

  To come and go unheard, a ghost unseen

  Among the courtly mirrors glacial green,

  Placed just beyond her reach for fear that she

  Forget her loneliness, her image see

  Grown concrete, not a ghost by cold airs blown.

  So each reflection blooms there but her own.

  She sits at other people’s tables, raises

  Her hands at other people’s joys and praises

  Their cold amusements, drawing down the blinds

  Over her face for others’ griefs, – the winds

  Her sole friends now …45

  Sitwell was not really a feminist, but what she saw of the lives of dependent women escaped the notice of most poets of her time, and she had the skill to make something of it.

  By March 1925, Sitwell had prevailed upon Dorothy Todd, the editor of British Vogue, to arrange a meeting for her in Paris with Gertrude Stein. She was then brought to Stein’s house by the musician Elmer Harden.46 Sitwell described Stein for Violet Schiff: ‘She is an impressive oldish woman; her figure looks like that of a German hausfrau, or perhaps a head-mistress; but she has a superb face, with sensitive modelling. And she seems full of rich, earthy, Schumannesque life, if you know what I mean.’ They disagreed about the war, and Sitwell found her views somewhat hard-minded:

  She can’t understand suffering; she is infinitely interested in the subtleties of character. She is very dictatorial, and never listens to anything anybody else may say; she merely interrupts them in the middle of a sentence, says ‘It isn’t so, at all’, or, ‘It certainly is not for that reason’, and takes matters into her own hands. But I like her. She lives surrounded by some of the most wonderful modern pictures I have ever seen – superb Picassos, as well as many pictures by Juan Gris, Matisse, etc. I think it was she and her brother who first found and helped Picasso.47

  While Sitwell might admire Stein’s taste in art, she deferred to no one where the piano was involved. She saw that Ezra Pound, ‘who knows nothing of music’, and Gertrude Stein were creating a cult figure out of the young pianist and composer George Antheil: ‘Mr Antheil is tiny and round and flat, and talking to him … is very much like talking to a shut oyster that is being irritated by a pearl.’ Antheil was known for a violent, percussive style, and the claims made for him struck her as absurd: ‘I was assured by his admirers that he plays so loudly and so fast, and his own music is so difficult, that between the pieces he has to be carried out and slapped with wet towels like a boxer, and rubbed, and given smelling salts. I longed to ask if he wore boxing gloves, but didn’t dare.’48

  Sitwell started to write sketches for newspapers featuring the conversation of a Stein-like ‘Madame X’; in one, a princess, who happens to be training pet tigers to appreciate music, invites Madame X to a party for a famous pianist named Barbados, reputed to demolish each instrument he plays: ‘He smashes it utterly! It breaks down under him. And there he sits among the ruins like Nero when Rome was burning. So decadent! You must come!’ An impressive-looking piano tuner accompanies Barbados at each performance ‘to give first aid to the piano’.49

  After an ‘unpleasant operation’ on her back, Edith Sitwell went to Spain in April. In Madrid, she received ‘Sitwell Edith Sitwell’, a word portrait of her written by Stein. She read it aloud at dinner to Osbert, Sachie, Willie Walton, and Richard Wyndham, who were travelling with her.50 When she got back to London, she pressed a manuscript of Stein’s work (probably The Making of Americans, even though she had not actually read the novel yet) on Tom Balston at Duckworth’s, who turned it down. After that she tried to interest Virginia Woolf in it, for the Hogarth Press, but Woolf was not ready to take on Stein. The best Sitwell could do for her new friend was another salute in Vogue in October.51

  Virginia Woolf had come to a new understanding of Edith Sitwell, thinking of her not as a pamphleteer or a protester but as something more old-fashioned, a ‘well born Victorian spinster’ – a concept she managed more delicately than did Harold Acton. After a dinner with the Sitwells on 19 May, Woolf wrote: ‘Edith is an old maid. I had never conceived this. I thought she was severe, implacable & tremendous; rigid in her own conception. Not a bit of it. She is, I guess, a little fussy, very kind, beautifully mannered … She is elderly too, almost my age, & timid, & admiring & easy & poor, & I liked her more than admired or was frightened of her. Nevertheless I do admire her work, & thats what I say of hardly anyone: She has an ear, & not a carpet broom; a satiric vein and some beauty in her.’52 At the end of October 1925, the Hogarth Press released Sitwell’s essay Poetry and Criticism.

  That year, Sitwell attempted another modernist fairy tale, this time Cinderella or ‘Cendrillon’ intertwined with a retelling of the story of Venus and Psyche from which it is thou
ght to derive. The myth of Psyche would not be a surprising subject for a poet who had been disappointed in her search for a husband. Some of the poem is playful, even flippant: ‘And Cupid ran to Vulcan: “O papa! / Come quick! For I have seen Mars kiss Mama!”’53 Other parts are dream-like and languid. The poem pursues a theme similar to The Sleeping Beauty: ‘Sometimes the songs which may appear most strange / Are of the growth of consciousness, – the range / Of consciousness awakening from sleep.’54 Sitwell wanted to account for how the evolving soul gradually separates itself from the material world and so becomes an individual identity. The last section is largely built around Helen’s anthroposophical ideas – particularly a notion of Steiner’s on waking from a ‘mineral sleep’,55 a kind of sleep which, owing to the accumulations of salts in the body, ‘lifts human beings wholly out of their bodies and places them within the spiritual world. In this third stage of sleep we live with the essential being of the spiritual world itself.’56

  Sitwell invested an enormous effort in this sprawling poem, which in some versions absorbed a good deal of Elegy on Dead Fashion (1926). However, she separated them again in Rustic Elegies, released in March 1927, and called the Cendrillon poem ‘Prelude to a Fairy Tale’. Even so, she was not satisfied. She shortened the poem, and finally dropped it from her later collections – salvaging from it only the playful ‘Polka’, which she added to Façade: ‘“Tra la la – / See me dance the polka”’.57 Even though she came to regard Rudolf Steiner as ‘otherwise tiresome’, his idea of awakening from a mineral sleep interested her as late as 1943: ‘I once wrote a very bad poem based on that. One day I may write a good one.’58 That day did not come.

  The summer and autumn of 1925 were dominated by Sachie’s plan to marry Georgia Doble, the beautiful daughter of a Canadian banker. Devoted to Sachie’s genius, she was socially ambitious and hard-nosed. Although he did his best to welcome Georgia, Osbert felt that by marrying, Sachie was abandoning him. Within a few years Osbert decided that Georgia was a gold-digger, a view encouraged by his mischief-making friends, Christabel Aberconway and David Horner. However, in 1925 Osbert lamented not the appearance of a competitor for Sir George’s money, but a rival for Sachie’s affections. As is generally observed, Sacheverell’s marriage began a gradual estrangement between the brothers, who by the 1960s were barely on speaking terms.