Meanwhile, Geoffrey Grigson broke new ground in critical vituperation: he wrote in Polemic of the ‘idiot romance’ of Sitwell’s work, and hinted that her success was the work of a ‘black militia’ of reviewers. Sixty-five years later, what stands out in Grigson’s article is his repeated use of the word ‘frigidities’ to characterise lines of her poetry. Although the term had appeared occasionally in earlier criticism, it was a misogynistic cheap shot when applied to a woman poet. Grigson also seized on one of Sitwell’s descriptions of an unborn child and called it ‘the horrible embryo (which could only have been contrived by a poet who had never experienced pregnancy)’. He faulted her for ‘untruths to nature’ and insinuated that her supposed failure as a poet proceeded from sexual inadequacy and childlessness.18 Although Grigson is often regarded as a tough-minded truth-teller, it seems that in this article he inadvertently revealed something about his own thinking. His kind of close observation stands, partly, on a hidden foundation of ideas about sex, gender, and perception. Indeed, the ‘nature’ that the poet was meant to observe was, at least to a degree, a masculine imagining that posed as plain fact. That Grigson supported some women poets who wrote as he preferred does not really answer this objection to his criticism, especially as he was one of those most responsible for the eventual demolition of the reputation of the outstanding woman poet of the time.
Sitwell did not say what among all this most offended her, but she was prepared to launch a libel suit – and on this occasion it might have been a useful gesture on behalf of women writers generally.19 John Piper, a friend of both writers, tried to broker a truce. Sitwell resented Piper’s meddling but had to submit since Osbert needed him to illustrate his memoirs. Holding her nose, she exchanged letters with Grigson in December, agreeing that they should not criticise each other in print. Before long Grigson was criticising her work again without actually naming her.
In the midst of this tangle, she listened on 2 December to the third broadcast about her work, in which Dylan Thomas recited ‘The Shadow of Cain’. She told Pavlik: ‘His reading is one of the most transcendentally great things imaginable, and last night he exceeded himself. It was terrible, and it was great. Every possible means was used. And hearing it, I felt – well, perhaps I need not bother, really, about all the little Grigsons and worms of that sort.’20 Sitwell was now calling Dylan Thomas her ‘spiritual son’.21
With the war over, Sitwell spent a good deal of time in London, and was steadily making new friends. Peace also made it possible to travel abroad, so in January 1947 she obtained a new passport. It described her eyes as grey and her hair as brown. Although she was often said to be considerably over six feet tall, her height was given as five feet, eleven inches.22 Her first journey was mainly for business. Osbert had to see lawyers and accountants in Switzerland in order to settle Sir George’s estate. Travelling with David Horner, they arrived at the Grand Hotel in Locarno on 19 January and stayed until 7 March; they went on to Lausanne for a week before returning to London on 15 March. While in Switzerland, Edith composed a lecture to be delivered on her return, as well as her presidential address to the League Against Cruel Sports.
In Switzerland, she read some works by Jean-Paul Sartre. She admired the play Huis-clos (No Exit), but found that Sartre lacked the visionary depth she looked for in a writer: ‘He is cleverness itself: but there is not one drop of genius in the whole of his composition. He has an enormous inventive power. But there seems to be no connection between the real world or the world of the spirit, and that invention.’23 More important for her was a reading of Carl Gustav Jung’s The Psychology of the Unconscious. She wrote to Pavlik:
I think Jung is a writer, often, of great nobility and beauty, although all psycho-analysts seem to me slightly cuckoo. I think it was H. G. Wells who said in conversation that all that might be true about Viennese Jews, but it wasn’t true about him. And I thoroughly agree with him. But Freud and Jung seem to have had most unpleasant patients, and personally I don’t think it was much use curing them on the outside. They would continue hopelessly and crawlingly unwholesome inside. And all these insinuations upset every human relation. I don’t believe little girls have sexual feelings about their fathers, or little boys about their mothers. But that, of course, is more Freud’s way of seeing things than Jung’s.24
It is not surprising that she became more and more enthusiastic about Jung, whose views on archetypes dovetailed with her own approach to poetic imagery.
Sitwell and Tchelitchew had been writing to each other now for about twenty years, and Tchelitchew was wondering what should become of their correspondence. He declared in September 1946 that their letters must remain private and never be printed, but by January he had changed his mind, telling Sitwell he would write in his will that they might be published thirty-five years after his death. Sitwell was a bit startled by his decision, but eventually agreed with it. In April, he wrote: ‘I wish I could see and talk to you – but frankly to say your letters are of such value to my mind to myself that I really couldn’t have more physical sensation even when I will see you, so much of you is in every line – free frank and simply stated.’25 At the risk of over-analysing a compliment, it seems that Tchelitchew saw the letters as erotic but safe; Sitwell’s language was naked yet it made no claims on his own body. Nearly sixty, Sitwell might well have married him if asked, and she told him again and again that she was easier to get along with than she had been back in Paris: ‘I shall never get the wisdom I long for, but I am not, perhaps, the fool I was.’26 These hints played on his mind and soon caused a great deal of trouble. In May, she suggested that Tchelitchew go to Zurich to be analysed by Jung, and it is a pity that he did not do so, as he was on the verge of one of his periods of deep irrationality.
As Edith Sitwell’s reputation grew in the 1940s, there was interest in her relationship with Yeats. His widow, Georgie Yeats, wrote to her: ‘I remember the great stimulus he got from his deep admiration of your work and the affection he felt for yourself personally. Perhaps you did not know that. When he had met you he always talked for days about you and your own exciting conversation. By “exciting” I mean exciting in his own sense. You encouraged him and gave him new ideas and approaches. Your chapter in “Aspects of Modern Poetry” especially.’27 It is strange to think that Yeats, who so influenced Sitwell, was also influenced by her.
At Georgie Yeats’s suggestion, Sitwell met in December 1946 with Richard Ellmann who was writing his biography of Yeats. Although Sitwell could see that Ellmann was a man of ability, she felt that Mrs Yeats did not understand what he was doing; she thought it ‘disgusting’ that he was so concerned with whether or not Yeats had had sex with Maud Gonne. Indeed, at this point she reveals her ambivalence about Jews. She was ferociously opposed to any persecution of or discrimination against Jews, but on a personal level found Jewishness inscrutable: ‘[Ellmann] is a Jew and therefore has a kind of mental sexual mania (Freud, after all, was a Jew. And I am certain that some Jews do have those odd kinks – manias for their mothers, and so forth. But I don’t think it is normal in races which are not Jewish, – that sort of in-turning mania). They – the Jews – always fuss more about sex than anybody else.’28
In June 1946, Sir Kenneth Clark had asked Edith Sitwell for a chronology of her poems. She wrote to him at length and with typical inaccuracies about time and place, but it gave him something to work with.29 His article was published a year later, and it made much of the connection with Yeats. She responded:
It was so strange, reading what you said about ‘The Poet Laments the Coming of Old Age’, – the phrase ‘It is almost impossible to read the last two lines except in an Irish accent.’ – Actually, when I wrote the poem, I had been thinking about Mr. Yeats, and things he had said to me once about a foolish wisdom – not particularly significant in themselves, but opening out on to a horizon. The ‘Poor Young Simpleton’ poem was a come-back to Vanessa and Stella – only a boy was speaking instead of a woman, in order
to fit the second part of the poem. Through ‘I Live Under a Black Sun’ I exteriorised, and learnt everything, almost, that I could learn, excepting technically.30
Clark’s essay appeared in an issue of Horizon (July 1947) dedicated to the Sitwells. The editor Cyril Connolly wrote that ‘during the darkest years of the war they managed not only to produce their best work, to grow enormously in stature but to find time to be of immense help to others … and so this number … is wholeheartedly dedicated to them.’ Of course, Connolly praised Edith Sitwell’s work in the most extraordinary ways while she lived but after her death reduced his estimate sharply. Sachie thought this a piece of trimming.31
Edith Sitwell spent the summer of 1947 at Renishaw. For a poet who created fantastical worlds and symbolic landscapes, the preceding seven years had deepened her attachment to the actual but no less mysterious terrain of Derbyshire and Yorkshire. She wrote to Pavlik at the end of August:
Last night I went for a motor drive, with Osbert, over the wonderful moors. I cannot tell you the beauty of the shape of those infinite spaces, infinite stretches, long lines of calm and of distance. The moon was very strange, like a veiled weeping woman. In Wilde’s awful work ‘Salome’ somebody or other said ‘The Moon is like a veiled woman.’ And when I was seventeen, I thought, ‘This is impressive, but it isn’t true.’ But last night, I saw it for myself. A mist had gathered in a long line beneath the Moon, faintly over it, and above it … so that it was like a veiled woman with outstretched arms.32
A few days later, she went south to spend five weeks with Evelyn, and they split their time, as usual, between London and Bournemouth. In London, Sitwell discussed with the American poet Diana Reeve the possibility of a reading and lecture tour of the United States, to be organised by the Colston Leigh Agency. Reeve contacted her cousin the philanthropist Ralph Lowell, who invited Edith and Osbert to give the Lowell Lectures in Boston. Pavlik was delighted by the idea of the tour, but Edith hesitated on the grounds that she could take only five pounds out of the country and would need a new wardrobe. An expert at finding patrons, Pavlik went to one of New York’s most philanthropic families and had everything arranged by the late winter. Vincent Astor’s wife Minnie and his sister Alice Pleydell-Bouverie agreed to bankroll a visit by Edith and Osbert Sitwell. They could provide accommodation at the St Regis Hotel and deduct any losses from income tax as a donation for ‘cultural relations’. The Astors had had contact with Sachie a few years earlier, and were evidently interested in the Sitwells.33 On 8 January 1948, Edith sent a cable to Pavlik confirming that she, Osbert, and David Horner were coming for several weeks in October, and asking him to ‘prepare the ground’ for readings at the Museum of Modern Art. She contacted Professor Theodore Spencer to set up appearances at Harvard and Wellesley College. Sachie was not included in the plan, which led to a new quarrel, with Georgia complaining that Osbert and Edith were ‘skimming the cream off the milk’.34
Through the autumn of 1947, Edith Sitwell was putting together a selection of the writings of William Blake. However, she abandoned the book because she felt overmatched by Northrop Frye, the Canadian scholar whose Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake she reviewed for the Spectator in October. She wrote a fan letter to Frye and sent him a copy of ‘The Shadow of Cain’. He wrote back:
Thank you very much for The Shadow of Cain, a very lovely, haunting, and almost unbelievably suggestive poem. The apparently effortless way in which a contemporary situation expands, by way of certain human archetypes, into its ultimate values of primeval cold and unquenchable life, makes the poem a kind of miniature epic. I know by this time what to look for in major poetry, and I always find it. Reversing the axiom, when I find what satisfies me in a poem I know that it is major, and The Shadow of Cain belongs to the restricted canon of major poetry. The close connection between your mind and Blake’s, which has become so striking in recent years, is an additional and personal reason for my liking it, not because I want all poetry to be ‘Blakean’, but because you are one of the few poets who confirm the authenticity of the experience I went through in submitting myself to Blake’s influence.35
Like Jung, Frye offered Sitwell a theoretical justification for a poetry that was visionary and archetypal, and through 1948 Sitwell recommended Frye’s work to almost every writer she knew.
Jack Lindsay, although hardly in Northrop Frye’s league, was an influential Marxist critic from Australia. He became absorbed in Sitwell’s work, and she regarded him, at least for a time, as a ‘seer’ in criticism.36 She invited him and his wife Ann to lunch at the Sesame on 24 March 1948, and was astounded by the number of craters in his face, ‘as though he had once been a volcano!’ But she liked him immediately.37 In July, he sent her his essay ‘The Latest Poems of Edith Sitwell’, which gave a leftward spin to her writing.38 She wrote to him: ‘Your understanding is the most extraordinary I know. I am amazed always by its depth, its sweep, and its comprehensiveness. Because every overtone is seized – not only the foundations and what Jung (I think) called “the suns from below the horizon” … this great illumination and belief is as much needed by my creative self, as water is by a plant, and sun is by a plant.’ She paid him the extraordinary compliment of asking permission to read from his essay in one of her broadcasts as a better account of the meaning of ‘The Shadow of Cain’ than she could give herself.39 Lindsay thought that for Sitwell there was no great contradiction between Christianity and Marxism,40 but she may have led him on somewhat and told him what he wanted to hear. In any event, they became friends, despite Sitwell’s occasional outbursts over his requests that she read books and manuscripts that excited him but caused eye-strain for her.
Perhaps prompted by her exchanges with Frye and Lindsay, Sitwell wrote to Tchelitchew on 15 May: ‘People pay no heed to symbols. If they did, they would regard them as warnings, as lights, as signposts, and men would be wiser.’ She went on to describe a symbol that her poetry shared with Sachie’s:
A Gold Man occurs frequently in my poetry. And a great many people talk a great deal of nonsense about this. Actually, in a field somewhere near Sachie’s house, a man clothed in gold armour was dug up (when we were children). He had obviously been killed in battle. Would not that haunt the memory of anyone? Both Sachie and I are haunted by it. And to this is added the memory of the finding of the Tombs of the Atridae – and of how for one moment the finder – a dull German – saw the face of Agamemnon and the gold by which he was surrounded – and then everything vanished – into dust – into air.41
Sitwell’s longing for symbols with an ultimate validity was drawing her closer to Catholicism. That spring she read a number of novels and essays by François Mauriac and Léon Bloy. She found somewhat vulgar Bloy’s notion that it is better to suffer with the poor than to create great art. She later described him for a new protégé, the Catholic poet and novelist Tom Clarkson, as ‘A furious man of genius, loving God but hating his fellow men’.42 Alec Guinness recalled that for a time she was ‘obsessed’ and gave him as a birthday present a book about Bloy. In Guinness’s view, this author touched Sitwell’s compassionate nature.43 Closer to home was Graham Greene; in 1945, she had written to him: ‘I said before, but I repeat it, what a great priest you would have made. But you are better as you are.’44 In May 1948, she read The Heart of the Matter and wrote to David Horner (himself a convert to Catholicism): ‘Have you read Graham Greene’s new book? It may prevent me from committing suicide!!’45
At the centre of a new group of friendships was the South African poet William Plomer. Sitwell had known him since 1929, but the two had grown closer during the war as they were both friends of Lehmann and Capetanakis. Plomer visited Renishaw at the beginning of September 1944, and became a frequent guest at the Sesame. When suffering from neuritis in April 1945, Sitwell was comforted to receive a letter from him: ‘It arrived at a moment when I was considering cutting my throat with my left hand because I couldn’t use my right hand sufficiently to do any work. But I c
hanged my mind immediately, though I still write with an uncertain hand, as you can see.’46
Plomer introduced Sitwell to Lilian Bowes Lyon, whom he had once thought of marrying. She suffered from diabetes and Buerger’s disease, an autoimmune condition that damages the circulatory system. Sitwell described her for Pavlik on 21 May 1948: ‘I have to go and see a poor woman who was kicked by a hysteric in the slums (where she was working) during one of the air raids – and who, as a result has had to have both legs taken off – and may have to have both arms off!! It gave her an exceedingly rare disease. Her name is Lilian Bowes Lyon: she is a cousin of the Queen. She is a saint, and writes, for a woman, quite fair poetry. (I don’t consider myself a woman when I write poetry).’47 Peter Alexander tells us that the sequence of amputations owing to gangrene was toes, feet, legs below the knee and then below the hip.48 Allergies made it impossible for her to take painkillers. Sitwell wrote letters of comfort to both Plomer and Bowes Lyon through the next year. One of Bowes Lyon’s last letters was to Sitwell on 12 July 1949: ‘So Edith, I did try hard to die, three times I had to put off in case someone’s feelings got hurt, & even now I am tethered by tiny dim little threads I haven’t fully honoured until now the question arises, of whether to break them & at last stop being racked – but hurt the dim “others” or to let the grey little threads hold me & let the pain increase.’49 Two weeks later, she died at the age of fifty-three (The Times, 26 July 1949).
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