Despite her cruel tongue, excessive kindness was a trap that Edith Sitwell often fell into. She told Pavlik: ‘Oh, what a fool I have made of myself in the past: oddly enough, in every single case because I really tried to live a truly Christian life, helping where I could help. I never refused help, where I could give it.’63 In late December, Evelyn Wiel came to England and stayed with Sitwell first in London and then, in January, at a hotel in Bournemouth. They had a talk about money, and Evelyn agreed to ask her brother, the solicitor Ernest Rootham, to take part of the burden from Sitwell. Having sent some money during the war, he told her he could do little more. Evelyn wrote a blistering letter, to which he responded, ‘“Don’t write nasty letters to me. I am not quite so bad as you appear to think.”’64 Sitwell believed Ernest Rootham was a selfish swine who was perfectly happy for Evelyn’s problems to fall on her. He made occasional efforts to help Evelyn, but Sitwell carried the bulk of her expenses and grew increasingly angry about the arrangement.
Evelyn’s mind was wandering, and she needed attention through the day. It was a glimpse of the future. Edith wrote to Pavlik:
What between the agony of heart and the knowledge that if I give way, and go back to the life I had before the war, I shall never write poetry again – I am utterly exhausted and worn out. It is horrible. She is so good – one of the best and most golden-hearted of people. And she is so devoted to me. I wouldn’t hurt her for anything. But I have to write.... I have to be free. You see, I never was, in all my life, until the war came. Is not that a terrible thing to say? I was bound hand and foot. First by my frightful mother, and then afterwards by affection, pity, and duty. I really am in some ways a very bad nature, and I feel I have been sacrificed enough. And then, having said that, I feel cruel.65
Sitwell’s guilt over Evelyn Wiel was then compounded by a train ride to Southampton with three badly burnt airmen, one of whom had lost his nose and lips and yet did not complain: ‘What woman could ever be worthy to love him?’66
Sitwell was annoyed that Lincoln Kirstein had tried to bring Choura to the United States to live with Pavlik. She saw it as a case of a good person doing an ‘appallingly wicked’ thing while remaining certain of his own virtue – as the dying Helen had done in making Edith promise to go on living in the flat with Evelyn. Pavlik’s case was hardly parallel to Edith’s, but she believed it was: ‘And in the past someone who was truly fond of me, and who examined the conscience most carefully, did that same thing to me, – but no doubt under the semi-belief it was doing me a kindness. So only the thing is wicked – not the intention. And only the intention counts with God, I am sure. But the act, sometimes, is pretty hard to bear if we are only human.’67
Knowing of her worries about Evelyn, Pavlik decided to be encouraging so he launched into a broken rhapsody over her achievements. He said he detected mystery and a ‘note of joy’ in her writings of the last year,
not earthly one, but universal joy of having joined the road that goes straight to eternity. It is a final overtaking of all other thoughts of all feelings by the one of unearthly heavenly love and tenderness and goodness … After many years of long hard road for your fragile supersensitif heart, supersensitif brain – a golden door had appear itself slowly but definitly. When one reaches that door – it means eternity, it means the one thing doing[?] in the church – eternal glory, glory to person, but impersonal glory in itself … I am so glad that you see that door getting more and more oppen and the wonders it will revel to you are beyond guessing and beyond description.68
The biographer can add nothing to this, except, perhaps, sic.
Sitwell was undoubtedly touched by what he said, but his cheerful talk about a door may have taken on a nightmarish quality in her mind, or the image may have reappeared simply by coincidence. In one of her notebooks, we find this passage:
When they reached the open door,
The Fate said ‘My feet ache …’
The Wanderers said ‘Our hearts ache …’
There was great lightning
In flashes coming over the floor …
The whiteness of Bread, the whiteness of the Dead,
The whiteness of the Claw –
All this coming to us in lightning through the open door …
It is marked ‘Note: written on the very verge of sleep’.69 With slight modifications it was incorporated into ‘The Shadow of Cain’. Pavlik thought that the visionary door was golden and would open to glory. What Sitwell saw through the door was the light of destruction.
20
AN OLD MAD FACE
I think that, in some way, I offended you, through some thoughtless, irresponsible written or spoken word, on some occasion, those nine or ten years back … May I say, now, as I know I should have said many years before, how sorry and, inarticulately, more than that, I am … If my apology, true as my love of your Song of the Cold, reads to you as stiltedly as, quickly writing, it sounds to me, I’m sorry again and can only say how hard I find it to move naturally into the long silence between now and nine beautiful, dreadful years ago.1
Dylan Thomas had just read Edith Sitwell’s review of his Deaths and Entrances. Not long after Helen’s death in 1938, she gave up on him because of his disappearing acts. She did not like the poetry he produced in the late 1930s, but she continued to hope that he would mature. Now, especially in ‘Fern Hill’, his poem about a Welsh childhood, she could see that he was living up to his promise. He came to luncheon at the Sesame on 11 April 1946 and seems to have maintained the demeanour of a penitent. The other guests were Louis MacNeice and his wife Hedli (an actress and singer). Louis MacNeice’s first book Blind Fireworks (1929) was influenced by Edith Sitwell, and he made no secret of the fact – even to Geoffrey Grigson.2 Thomas appears to have allowed MacNeice to carry the conversation, as Sitwell pressed for information on yet another ‘scientific horror’, the lobotomising of the mentally ill.3 It was at this luncheon, or one soon after, that Dylan Thomas expressed a strong preference for her recent work: ‘You have only been a great poet during the last six years.’4
All three took part in a poetry recital at the Wigmore Hall on the afternoon of 14 May. John Masefield presided in a programme that also included T. S. Eliot, Edith Evans, John Gielgud, C. Day Lewis, Walter de la Mare, and Flora Robson. The Queen, Princess Elizabeth, and Princess Margaret were in the audience, and the whole affair was, in Sitwell’s view, elegant and dull:
Then, suddenly, on to the stage tramped – there is no other word for it – Dylan. A strange figure – short, powerful looking, and as broad as he is high, dressed in highly unsuitable clothes four sizes too large for him: violently checked trousers which looked as if they were done up with string, a bright turquoise blue coat and a collar and tie that were springing from their moorings … Dylan then, slowly and in a dark voice that seemed to come from the very centre of the earth and the beginnings of life, recited The Tyger. His short figure and ugly inspired face with its eyes like pebbles, short thick nose, thick lips, were forgotten. I think everyone knew that they were listening to one of the greatest works of Man, spoken by a very great poet. He might have been Blake himself.5
His wife Caitlin made a rather different impression. According to Denys Kilham Roberts (a solicitor who ran the Society of Authors), she somehow got behind the Queen and, unpresented, asked, ‘I say, – do you like this? I don’t. I think I shall ask for my money back,’ and then dropped cigarette ash on the Queen’s dress. Back at the Sesame, where Sitwell held a dinner party for a group of fifteen, Caitlin needed the help of Sitwell and Betty Kilham Roberts to get up the stairs: ‘Mother of God, dear, must we be moving?’ As the dinner was about to start, Georgia Sitwell said to the guests: ‘Oh there is a woman in the cloakroom more roaringly drunk than anyone I have ever seen in my life.’ Dylan Thomas answered grimly, ‘That will be my wife.’
Thomas went on to castigate Eliot for allowing F. R. Leavis to talk about ‘Dislodging Milton’ from the canon. Then he asked about his work
at Faber & Faber: ‘why does a poet like you publish such awful poetry. You know it is bad.’
Caitlin took a fancy to Sacheverell, but when she spilt some ice cream on her bare arm she demanded that John Hayward, whom she had never met before, lick it off. He refused, so she repeated her demand. Hayward said he would lick it off any part of her body anywhere else, but not in the dining room of the Sesame Club. Caitlin answered, ‘The insults of Men! You great pansy. What for are you sitting in that throne, and twisting your arms like that?’ They made some sort of truce, and at the end of the meal she sat stroking his wrist and calling him ‘Old Ugly’. Other guests were not amused. Sitwell felt herself ‘suddenly transfixed by two blue lightnings from John Lehmann’s eyes … I am sure lightnings on Judgment Day will be just like that.’6
That summer Sitwell was exchanging transatlantic favours with Charles Henri Ford. He appointed her an advisory editor of his magazine View, and under its imprint he was set to publish the American edition of Green Song. In London, she began hawking around his manuscript ‘Sleep in a Nest of Flames’, but her agent David Higham thought that with paper shortages no publisher would want a long collection of poems from a little-known author, so she gently persuaded Ford to make cuts.7 Even so, the manuscript went from firm to firm for over a year, until she had to tell him it could not be published in England.8 The book, with a foreword by Sitwell, was eventually published in the United States by James Laughlin of New Directions in 1949.
As she was always a performer in letters and conversation, it was part of Edith Sitwell’s schtick to lament the number of unpublished writers who sent their manuscripts to her. In fact, she regarded the search for talent as part of her own vocation as a poet, and there turned out to be some of it in the village. The novelist and poet Paul West (b.1930), who went on to great success in the United States, grew up in Renishaw, and around 1946 he sought out Edith Sitwell to judge a poetry competition. He had heard in the village that she slept in a coffin, talked to ghosts, and could burn your eyes out with her stare.9 She tackled him about his plans for university:
At once she engaged the future for me, spelling out answers to questions I had never intended asking. She read my superego like a book, insisting that of course I should try for Oxford, where they trained prime ministers and taught you how to drink brandy and get plump, whereas Cambridge was for those awful scientists or boffins, back-room boys, who wanted to blow the world up. She mentioned The Shadow of Cain, which I had actually read. ‘Oxford,’ she said mesmerizingly, ‘will make you reach beyond yourself and be something in this world, the other place will stand you, dear boy, at a microscope and send you blind. I never attended a university myself. My nose was so hideous they decided to keep me out of sight in the hall cupboard. At least until some doctor, not a Nazi, made me presentable and straightened my dear old Plantagenet schnoz. You take those exams, and don’t let me catch you not doing well. Tell them you know me and that I have taught you to appreciate poetry.’
‘Well, you have, Miss.’ I had read her extraordinary patient look at the texture of Alexander Pope, a most unusual book for its period, with all the virtues of F. R. Leavis’s close reading without his moral bigotry.
She was shocked, yet stubbornly gratified.
‘No science, young you.’
‘No, ma’am. I promise. I can’t count anyway.’
‘Oxford.’
‘Oxford, ma’am, if I can.’
‘Of course you can. If you don’t, they’ll hear from me. There are some awfully nasty people in the literary profession, young you, and they are going to hear from me, vulgarly known as getting it in the neck.’10
At the risk of stating the obvious, West’s encounter with Sitwell is entirely typical of her; her snobbery was real but extremely porous. A person of talent could walk right through it.
At the beginning of September 1946, Edith Sitwell went to London for the release of Fanfare for Elizabeth, a short book for a popular audience about the early life of Elizabeth I. The subject resonated for her: Elizabeth was an unwanted child who achieved greatness, if not love. Sitwell had worked on it from time to time for about five years. Back in 1942, she had written to Tchelitchew about her research:
One can get no personal comfort, but I do get a kind of world comfort, – I mean, hope for the world’s future, from reading the history of the time of Henry the Eighth. I realise from this, that humanity has always been subject to these appalling and gigantic moral illnesses and fevers. In the time of Henry VIII, definitely, nobody was quite sane. Then it was a religious malady, now it is the insanity of political creeds, which will go to any length, and sacrifice anything, just as the two religious maladies of the time of Henry, sacrificed everything … at that time it must have been natural to think the whole world was sinking into chaos, with the appalling disasters which were sweeping Europe … But then everything passed, and the world became, for a time, comparatively sane again.11
The book sold nineteen thousand copies within three weeks of its release,12 and by January 1947 she had begun a sequel.
After hearing Constant Lambert recite Façade on 9 September 1946 at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, Sitwell went with Evelyn Wiel for a fortnight to the Branksome Towers Hotel in Bournemouth. A pattern was being established that allowed her to spend time with Evelyn two or three times each year without going to the flat in Paris. Against all the odds, Evelyn had been trying to pull her weight by teaching English, but she was in no shape to work: ‘She registers nothing, is very deaf, and has lost her memory entirely. She has the nature of a saint – all the old tiresomeness and inferiority complex has gone.’13
Having been effectively released from her promise to live in Paris, Sitwell was able to press on with her career, which now included broadcasting. The BBC’s Third Programme was launched on 29 September 1946 with a mission to broadcast the classical repertoire in music and drama and, insofar as possible, literature and the other arts.14 It later became Radio 3. A natural choice, Edith Sitwell was the subject of three broadcasts in October and November, with Dylan Thomas reciting some of her work. In the first two broadcasts, the poet and critic Henry Reed, now remembered mainly for the sequence ‘Lessons of the War’, and ‘Chard Whitlow’, his parody of T. S. Eliot, discussed her poetry. The first broadcast on 26 October consisted of readings and observations on her early and late manners. In the second broadcast, on 16 November, Reed said that he wanted to provide ‘a balanced estimate of her work. It has, I think, incomparable virtues; it has also some limitations. I want to look at both these things.’ He found the early poems amusing, if sometimes over-decorated: ‘You have to be rather a dull dog never to enjoy them. But one is always waiting for them to stop and for the real poem to begin.’
Reed then quoted one of Sitwell’s odd remarks (doubtless arising from her years as a pianist) on the relation between women’s physical strength and the acquisition of technique in poetry. Surprisingly, Reed did not disagree with her: ‘I should be the last to suggest that a man poet was by nature, automatically, and without effort, a good technician; I’d dare to say, however, that a woman poet was by nature a worse technician; just as women prose writers tend to be less grammatical than men. Women’s sensitiveness lies elsewhere; to divert part of it to the acquisition of formal excellence is one of the tasks which women writers have to face.’ He then posed a question about her later poems: ‘Here is a poet, you say, who has every sign of being on a large scale … Lyrical, rhapsodical, at times cryptic and sibylline, the music pours out, praising or lamenting. And then, a certain doubt … The great music seems to be repeating itself too often and at too long a stretch.’ He suggested that she was one of those romantic writers ‘who don’t know their own strength’.15
In her response broadcast on 2 December, Sitwell said that she had changed her view somewhat over the years: ‘Technique is very largely a matter of physique. But I no longer speak of “men poets” and “women poets” … and, although I have a profound dislike of ma
sculinity in women, in private life, I am at the same time extremely displeased if anyone refers to me as a woman poet.’ She was expressing the same discomfort that Graham Greene later claimed when called a ‘Catholic novelist’ rather than a novelist who happened to be a Catholic. As for whether she was repeating herself, she could say only that she believed otherwise and that she was her own sternest critic: ‘I throw away reams of verse.’16
In January 1945, Sitwell had said to Tchelitchew that she was hoping to write ‘a new kind of poetry, soon. One with practically no images, very “muscled”.’17 By this she meant a poetry that worked chiefly by sound, texture, syntax, and rhythm – an experiment in something near to pure form. In the early 1940s, she had stripped her imagery down to a handful of symbols such as wheat, sunlight, bone, deluge, precious stones, leprosy, and gold, and she made repeated use of the figures of Cain, Dives, Lazarus, and the returning Christ. The problem was that these could appear in only so many permutations before they became predictable – an effect she tried to offset by quoting or echoing offbeat works, usually of a visionary character. Sitwell’s poetry after ‘The Shadow of Cain’ continues to explore possibilities of sound and texture, but the reader has a more distracting sense of images and phrases being repeated. Some poems do break new ground, but more rarely than in the 1920s and the early 1940s.
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