Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

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  Greene, Richard (ed.), Graham Greene: A Life in Letters (London: Little, Brown, 2007; New York: W.W. Norton, 2008).

  —————, ‘Sir Beelzebub’s Syllabub: Or, Edith Sitwell’s Eighteenth Century’, Lumen, 20 (2001), 101–9.

  Greene, Thomas M., ‘Labyrinth Dances in the French and English Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54:4, part 2 (winter 2001), 1403–66.

  Greer, David, A Numerous and Fashionable Audience: The Story of Elsie Swinton (London: Thames Publishing, 1997).

  Gregory, James, ‘Eccentric Biography and the Victorians’, Biography, 30.3 (summer 2007), 342–76.

  Grigson, Geoffrey, The Harp of Aeolus (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1947).

  —————, ‘How Much Me Now Your Acrobatics Amaze’, Polemic, 3 (May 1946), 8–13.

  Guinness, Alec, Blessings in Disguise (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985).

  Hamnett, Nina, Laughing Torso (London: Constable, 1932).

  Higham, David, Literary Gent (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978).

  Holman-Hunt, Diana, Latin Among Lions: Alvaro Guevara (London: Michael Joseph, 1974).

  Hooker, Denise, Nina Hamnett: Queen of Bohemia (London: Constable, 1986).

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  Joyce, James, Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking Press, 1957).

  Kennedy, Michael, Portrait of Walton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

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  King-Hall, Stephen, Total Victory (London: Faber & Faber, 1941).

  Lane, Constance, The Three Rectories: Withington – Kennington – Little Gaddesden (Chichester: Phillimore, 2004).

  Langfield, Valerie, Roger Quilter, His Life and Music (Woodridge: Boydell Press, 2002).

  Lawrence, D. H., Collected Letters, ed. Harry T. Moore, 2 vols (London: Heinemann, 1962).

  Leavis, F. R., New Bearings in English Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932).

  Lehmann, John, Edith Sitwell (London: British Council and National Book League, 1952; revised edn, 1970).

  —————, In My Own Time: Memoirs of a Literary Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969).

  —————, A Nest of Tigers: Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell in their Times (London: Macmillan, 1968).

  Lerman, Leo, The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman, ed. Stephen Pascal (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).

  Lewis, Jeremy, Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane (London: Penguin, 2006).

  Lewis, Wyndham, The Apes of God (1930; Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1981).

  —————, The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed. W. K. Rose (London: Methuen, 1963).

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  —————, The Warden: A Portrait of John Sparrow (London: HarperCollins, 1998).

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  Martin, Wallace, The New Age Under Orage: Chapters in English Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967).

  Matthews, W. H., Mazes and Labyrinths (London: Longmans, Green, 1922).

  Mégroz, R. L., The Three Sitwells: A Biographical and Critical Study (London: Richards Press, 1927).

  Mitchell, L. G., Maurice Bowra: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  Moore, Marianne, ‘Dame Edith Sitwell’, Four Poets on Poetry, ed. Don Cameron Allen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959).

  Muir, Edwin, An Autobiography (London: Hogarth Press, 1954).

  Nashold, James, and George Tremlett, The Death of Dylan Thomas (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1997).

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  Lippincott, 1953).

  O’Keeffe, Paul, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000).

  Pearson, John, Façades: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell (London: Macmillan, 1978).

  Powell, Anthony, To Keep the Ball Rolling, 4 vols (London: Heinemann, 1976–82).

  Raper, Arthur, The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933).

  Reilly, Catherine (ed.), Scars Upon My Heart (London: Virago, 1993).

  Riding, Laura, and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1927).

  Rigby, Andrew, Initiation and Initiative: An Exploration of the Life and Ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinovi (Boulder: East European Monographs, CLXIV, 1984).

  Ritchie, Neil, ‘Footnote to Façade’, The Book Collector (Summer 1996), 261–2.

  Roberts, John Stuart, Siegfried Sassoon (London: Richard Cohen Books, 1999).

  Rogers, W. G., Wise Men Fish Here: The Story of Frances Steloff and the Gotham Book Mart (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965).

  Rootham, Helen, Fundamentals of Music and their Relation to Modern Life (London; Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1925).

  ————— (trans.), Kosovo: Heroic Songs of the Serbs, intro. Maurice Baring, historical preface Janko Lavrin (Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1920).

  ————— (trans.), Prose Poems from Les Illuminations, intro. Edith Sitwell (London: Faber & Faber, 1932).

  Rutherford, H. C. (ed.), Certainly, Future: Selected Writings by Dimitrije Mitrinovi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

  Salter, Elizabeth, Edith Sitwell (London: Jupiter Books, 1979) —————, The Last Years of a Rebel: A Memoir of Edith Sitwell (London: Bodley Head, 1967).

  Sassoon, Siegfried, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930; London: Faber & Faber, 1965).

  —————, Siegfried Sassoon Diaries 1915–1918, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Faber & Faber, 1983).

  Schehr, Lawrence, Alcibiades at the Door: Gay Discourses on French Literature (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1995).

  Schuster, David G., ‘Personalizing Illness and Modernity: S. Weir Mitchell, Literary Women, and Neurasthenia, 1870–1914’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 79.4 (2005), 695–722.

  Seymour-Smith, Martin, Robert Graves: His Life and Work (London: Hutchinson, 1982).

  Sherry, Norman, The Life of Graham Greene, 3 vols (London: Jonathan Cape, 1989–2004).

  Shulman, Nicola, A Rage for Rock Gardening: The Story of Reginald Farrer Gardener, Writer & Plant-Collector (Boston: David R. Godine, 2004).

  Sickert, Walter, A Free House! Or the Artist as Craftsman, ed. Osbert Sitwell (London: Macmillan, 1947).

  Silver, Kenneth E., ‘Neo-Romantics’, in Donald Albrecht (ed.), Paris/New York: Design/F
ashion/Culture 1925–1940 (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2008), 216–29.

  Sitwell, Constance, Bounteous Days (London: Cecil Woolf, 1976).

  —————, Bright Morning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1942).

  —————, Frolic Youth (London, 1964).

  Sitwell, George R., The Barons of Pulford (p.p., 1889).

  —————, A Brief History of Weston Hall, Northamptonshire, and of the Families that Possessed It (London: p.p., 1927).

  —————, Idle Fancies in Prose and Verse (Oxford: p.p., 1939).

  —————, On the Making of Gardens (London: John Murray, 1909).

  Sitwell, Osbert, Before the Bombardment (London: Duckworth, 1926; reprinted 1974).

  —————, Left Hand, Right Hand!, 5 vols (London: Macmillan, 1945–50).

  —————, Tales My Father Told Me (London: Hutchinson, 1962).

  ————— (ed.), Two Generations (London: Macmillan, 1940).

  Sitwell, Reresby, Renishaw Hall and the Sitwells (p.p., n.d.).

  Sitwell, Sacheverell, All Summer in a Day (London: Duckworth, 1931).

  —————, Apologia in Prose, Dodecameron (Brackley: p.p., 1977).

  —————, For Want of the Golden City (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973).

  —————, The Homing of the Winds (London: Faber & Faber, 1942).

  —————, An Indian Summer (London: Macmillan, 1982).

  —————, Liszt (1934; London: Columbus Books, 1988).

  —————, Splendours and Miseries (London: Faber & Faber, 1943).

  The Sitwells and the Arts of the 1920s and 1930s (London: NPG, 1994).

  Skeaping, John, Drawn from Life: An Autobiography (London: Collins, 1977).

  Spark, Muriel, ‘A Drink with Dame Edith’, Literary Review (February 1999), 32.

  Sparrow, John, Sense and Poetry (London: Constable, 1934).

  Spender, Natasha, ‘Lady Natasha Spender Remembers Edith Sitwell’, Daily Telegraph (8 June 2008).

  Stein, Gertrude, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933; New York: Vintage Books, 1960).

  Stojkovi, Tijana, ‘Unnoticed in the casual light of day’: Philip Larkin and the Plain Style (London: CRC Press, 2006).

  Sturgis, Matthew, Walter Sickert: A Life (London: HarperCollins, 2005).

  Thomas, Dylan, The Collected Letters, ed. Paul Ferris (London: J. M. Dent, 1985; 2nd edn 2000).

  Thompson, Lewis, Black Sun: The Collected Poems of Lewis Thompson, ed. Richard Lannoy (Prescott, Arizona: Hohm Press, 2001).

  Thwaite, Ann, Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape 1849–1928 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1984).

  Toklas, Alice B., What is Remembered (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963).

  Trevelyan, Raleigh, A Hermit Disclosed (London: Longman’s, 1960).

  —————, ‘Two Ediths and a Hermit’, London Review of Books (5 September 1985).

  Tubby, A. H., Deformities: A Treatise on Orthopædic Surgery (London, 1896; 2nd edn 1912).

  Tyler, Parker, The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew (New York: Fleet, 1967).

  Vickers, Hugo, Cecil Beaton: The Authorized Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985).

  Vidal, Gore, ‘How I Survived the Fifties’, New Yorker (2 October 1995), 62–76.

  Villa, José Garcia (ed.), A Celebration for Edith Sitwell (New York: New Directions, 1948).

  Waller, John C., ‘In a Spin: The Mysterious Dancing Epidemic of 1518’, Endeavour, 32:3 (September 2008), 117–21.

  Walter, Eugene (as told to Katherine Clark), Milking the Moon: A Southerner’s Story of Life on This Planet (New York: Crown Publishers, 2001).

  Walton, William, Façade 2: Facsimile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

  Warner, Philip, The Battle of Loos (London: Kimber, 1976).

  Waugh, Evelyn, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Michael Davie (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; Boston: Little, Brown, 1976).

  —————, The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980).

  Welch, Denton, A Lunch Appointment (North Pomfret, VT: Elysium Press, 1993).

  —————, The Journals of Denton Welch, ed. Michael De-La-Noy (London: Allison & Busby, 1984).

  Wescott, Glenway, Continual Lessons: The Journals of Glenway Wescott 1937-1955, ed. Robert Phelps with Jerry Rosco (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990).

  West, Paul, I, Said the Sparrow (London: Hutchinson, 1963).

  —————, Oxford Days: An Inclination (Latham, New York: British American Publishing, 2002).

  Whitman, Walt, Selected Poems, ed. Christopher Moore (New York: Gramercy Books, 1992).

  Wilson, Jean Moorcroft, Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet (London: Duckworth, 1998).

  Woolf, Virginia, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, asst. Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols (London: The Hogarth Press, 1977–84).

  —————, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and J. Trautmann, 6 vols (London: The Hogarth Press, 1975–80).

  —————, A Moment’s Liberty: The Shorter Diary, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1990).

  Wright, Adrian, John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1998).

  Ziegler, Philip, Osbert Sitwell: A Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998).

  List of Illustrations

  Endpapers Edith Sitwell by Maurice Beck: Sitwell collection

  xii Manuscript of ‘Still Falls the Rain’: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin

  37 Piano stools: from A. H. Tubby, Deformities: A Treatise on Orthopædic Surgery

  38 Spinal stays: from F. Gustav Ernst, A Guide to the Selection and Adaptation of Orthopædic Apparatus

  40 Nose truss: from F. Gustav Ernst, A Guide to the Selection and Adaptation of Orthopædic Apparatus

  73 Sketch of Osbert Sitwell, thought to be by Nina Hamnett: Sitwell collection

  93 Report of Lady Ida’s trial, News of the World, 14 March 1915

  111 Portrait of Edith Sitwell by Nina Hamnett, 1915: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin

  112 Sketch of the three Sitwells by Cecil Beaton, 1931: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin

  115 Osbert Sitwell by Geoffrey Gunther, 1918: The Provost and Fellows, Eton College

  130 Title page illustration from Wheels, fourth cycle, 1919: published by B. H. Blackwell, Oxford

  139 Caricature of Edith Sitwell by Siegfried Sassoon: William S. Reese

  153 ‘Mr Osbert and Mr Sacheverell Sitwell’ by Max Beerbohm, 1923: Scarborough Art Gallery, Scarborough Borough Council

  156 Review of the first performance of Façade, Daily Express, 13 June 1923

  169 ‘Mr Osbert and Mr Sacheverell Sitwell’ by Max Beerbohm, 1925: Sitwell collection

  204 ‘If the Sitwells indulged in the simple life’ by Adrian Allinson, c.1928: Michael Parkin Fine Art Ltd

  211 Caricature of Edith Sitwell by Siegfried Sassoon: William S. Reese

  305 Edith Sitwell by John Banting, 1943: National Portrait Gallery

  344 Edith Sitwell’s luggage label from the 1950s: Sitwell collection

  351 Drawings by Jean Cocteau, 1957: Private collection

  413 A form compiled by Edith and Osbert Sitwell in the 1950s: Sitwell collection

  436 Programme from the Royal Festival Hall celebration, 9 October 1962

  Acknowledgements

  In the writing of this book, I have benefited from the generosity of many people. My greatest debt is to the late Francis Sitwell and to Susanna Sitwell, who encouraged my research over many years. I am also grateful to the late Sir Reresby Sitwell and to Lady Sitwell, to William Sitwell and to other members of the Sitwell family. For twenty-three years I have had the good advice of Bruce Hunter of David Higham Associates; he is the best and most patient of literary agents. I have had the guidance of expert publishers and editors at Little, Brown UK: A
lan Samson, Richard Beswick, Lennie Goodings, Zoe Gullen and their colleagues. I have had the help of an expert research assistant, Marybeth Curtin. I am under very great obligations to many other people: Rev. William Adams, Peter Alexander, Sidney Aster, John Barham, James Beechey, Andrew Biswell, Barbara Cassel, Anne Charlton, Andrew Clay, HRH the Duchess of Cornwall, Melba Cuddy-Keane, Robert Murray Davis, Barry Day, Kildare Dobbs, Geoffrey Elborn, Roy Foster, Patrice Fox, Fred Flahiff, Isaac Gewirtz, the late Sir John Gielgud, Lyndall Gordon, Edward Greene, Geoffrey Green, Francis Greene, Sarah Greene, Samuel Greene, the late Sir Alec Guinness, John Haffenden, Jonathan Harris, Selina Hastings, Chris Hobbs, the late Ted Hughes, Heather Jackson, Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, the late Peter Levi, Jeremy Lewis, John MacDermot, Marianne Marusic, Rev. Gilles Mongeau, SJ, The Rt Hon the Lord Monteagle, Barbara Newman, Richard Oram, Karl Orend, Brian Parker, Derek Parker, David Pearce, John Pearson, Andrew Rigby, Neil Ritchie, Jane St. Aubyn, Amanda Saunders, Mary Savigny, Nicholas Scheetz, Rabbi Geoffrey L. Shisler, James Sexton, Nicholas Shakespeare, Lady (Natasha) Spender, Sam Solecki, Thomas Staley, Quentin Stevenson, The Hon. Julia Camoys Stonor, Elizabeth Swarbrick, Nicholas Swarbrick, Margaret Swarbrick, Leslie Thomson, Raleigh Trevelyan, Gore Vidal, James Watson, Alexander Waugh, Paul West, and Philip Ziegler. The research for this book was funded by a Fleur Cowles Research Fellowship and a Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship, both of which were granted by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and by a Standard Research Grant of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

  Index

  Aberconway, Christabel 179, 196, 202, 254, 258, 433

  Acciaiuoli, Castle of 64–5

  Ackerley, Joe 87, 401

  Acton, Harold 117, 141–2, 183, 437

  Adams, Henry 224

  Adams, William 37–8

  Adderley, Peter Broughton 119

  Adler Society 143–4

  Aeolian Hall 166, 167–8

  Albania 267

  Aldeburgh Festival 363, 405, 411, 441

  Aldington, Richard 141

  Alexander, Peter 341, 357

  ‘Alive – Alive O’ (O. Sitwell) 132

  Almer, Mrs 250

  Alvarez, A. 409–10; The Shaping Spirit: Studies in Modern English and American Poets 410