Edith Sitwell

  Also by Richard Greene

  The Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell

  Graham Greene: A Life in Letters

  Copyright

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 9781405511070

  Copyright © 2011 Richard Greene

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  For Marianne

  Contents

  Also by Richard Greene

  Copyright

  Edith Sitwell in Her Own Words

  Prologue: Why?

  1 Facts of Life

  2 A Sense of Place

  3 Servants and Surgeons

  4 Growing Eyebrows

  5 Bringing Out

  6 Becoming a Poet

  7 The Great Wars

  8 I Do Hope It Isn’t Ladylike

  9 The Tango

  10 Alice in Hell

  11 Too Fantastic for Fat-Heads

  12 Gertrude

  13 You Are Russian, Are You Not?

  14 All Ears for Edith

  15 Let the Devils Have It

  16 Two Nations

  17 And with the Ape Thou Art Alone

  18 An Abbess

  19 The Dancing Madness

  20 An Old Mad Face

  21 The Other Side of the World

  22 Fallen Man Dreams He Is Falling Upward

  23 Frost on the Window

  24 The Empress Penguin

  25 I Prefer Chanel Number 5

  Abbreviations

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  Index

  Edith Sitwell in Her Own Words

  I am fundamentally kind, if you discount my conversation, which is very often not …

  On cats: They never say anything silly, you see, and that’s something.

  I have always been in bad taste – and glory in it. Good taste, I think, belongs to the world of advertisements – ‘Persil’ etc, and fussing about what the neighbours think.

  On being asked if she was a handful for her parents: My parents were a handful for me. They weren’t parents I would recommend to anybody.

  Why is it that every man who possesses genius in his head and love in his heart, every man who can think and dares speak against abuses, everybody who pleads the cause of mercy and who champions the unfortunate, is called a crank by all the half-wits of his time?

  On hostile reviewers: All the Pipsqueakery are after me in full squeak.

  Yes. I believe. I believe in people – and I believe. Anyway, it’s better with all banners flying – isn’t it?

  On being asked, at seventy-five, how she was: Dying, but apart from that I’m all right.

  A manuscript of ‘Still Falls the Rain’, Edith Sitwell’s most famous poem. It was inspired by the bombing of Sheffield in December 1940

  WHY?

  On the night of 12 December 1940, three hundred aeroplanes operating under the light of a full moon struck Sheffield. They blasted factories, shops, and houses, and for those hours the city was turned into a hell of dust, flame, and flying glass. At 11.44 p.m. a high-explosive bomb demolished the seven-storey Marples Hotel in Fitzalan Square; seventy people inside, many of them sheltering in the cellars, were killed. The next day, a handful of survivors were pulled from the heap of bricks and girders. It is said that one man, though physically unharmed, was so shocked that he eventually hanged himself. In the years to come, the site of the hotel was treated with the fear and reverence that New Yorkers feel for the site of the World Trade Center. Sheffield was attacked again on 15 December, and between the two raids over six hundred people were killed. In the following week, there was yet more bombing.

  Renishaw Hall stands about eight miles from the heart of Sheffield. It was relatively safe, though stray bombs fell in the neighbourhood. Edith Sitwell heard the planes overhead and the repeated explosions. She wrote to her brother Sacheverell, ‘one thought every second or so would be our last’.1 A few days later, she wrote to the painter Pavel Tchelitchew: ‘How wonderful was the experience, when I went into the town; work-girls, shop-girls, men assistants whom I knew, – as we clasped each other by the hand, each said to the other, I to them and they to me: “Thank God you are safe.” They are utterly unmoved, and resolute.’2

  Although she had been one of Britain’s leading poets in the 1920s, Sitwell had spent most of the following decade grinding out prose works to pay other people’s bills. The coming of the war rekindled her poetry. In late 1939, she had written ‘Lullaby’ and its companion ‘Serenade: Any Man to Any Woman’ – two visionary poems that captured, as well as any of the time, the calamity of Europe’s return to slaughter. Sitwell herself, often flippant, often snobbish, was now unable to turn her eyes from the war and from the pity of war. The challenge for a poet, she thought, was to meet the sheer magnitude of events. At the time of Dunkirk, she wrote: ‘The last fortnight has been on such a gigantic scale, that everything in history since the Crucifixion seems dwarfed – only Shakespeare could do justice to it.’3 A year later she wrote: ‘after those two terrible raids [on Sheffield] in December one could not write about them straight away, and how, immediately after such an experience, could one write about anything else in one’s own life?’4 By then, she had written the quintessential poem of the Blitz:

  Still falls the Rain –

  Dark as the world of man, black as our loss –

  Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails

  Upon the Cross.

  Still falls the Rain

  With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-beat

  In the Potter’s Field, and the sound of the impious feet

  On the Tomb:

  Still falls the Rain

  In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain

  Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.

  Still falls the Rain

  At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.

  Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us –

  On Dives and on Lazarus:

  Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.

  Still falls the Rain –

  Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man’s wounded Side:

  He bears in His Heart all wounds, – those of the light that died,

  The last faint spark

  In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark,

  The wounds of the baited bear, –

  The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat

  On his helpless flesh … the tears of the hunted hare.

  Still falls the Rain –

  Then – O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me doune –

  See, see where Christ’s blood streames in the firmament:

  It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree

  Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart

  That holds the fires of the world, – dark-smirched with pain

  As Caesar’s laurel crown.

  Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man

  Was once a child who among beasts has lain –

  ‘Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee.’

  Sitwell believed that much of the meaning of a poem is in the sound it makes. Twenty-five years earlier, she had told a cousin that she was experimenting with rhythms that were
like a heartbeat.5 Here she goes much further, tying together the sounds of falling rain, the hammering of nails, a pulse, the sound of feet on a tomb, the dropping of blood, and (never explicit except in a headnote) the thudding of bombs. All this is performed in the poem’s rhythm, which changes death into a solemn music and offers at the level of form the hope of a greater change. At the end of the poem there are two voices, Marlowe’s Faustus pleading in his last hour before damnation, and Christ offering Blood, ‘my innocent light’. In Sitwell’s view, there is as much chance that hell will take us as that we will accept the grace that is offered.

  ‘Still Falls the Rain’ is an extraordinary poem. It is not necessarily her best, but it was here that a poet of incomparable skill spoke most directly to the agonies of her time. However, her time is no longer our time. She died in 1964, and her reputation crashed soon after. To some degree, she created the conditions for such a reaction. For five decades, she had been brawling with her critics, whom she dubbed the ‘pipsqueakery’. Once she was gone, they were free to savage her work, even as she had savaged them. But tit for tat is not the whole story.

  Edith Sitwell’s particular kind of modernism – her refusal to be trapped by ancestral memory and her desire to overturn conventional ideas of the self – was rooted in the desolation of her family life. Her search for vision and greatness in poetry was partly an attempt to move beyond what she saw as the blindness and the smallness of the existence she was born to. As a woman, she lacked confidence in her gifts, and took many years to pass through an apprenticeship, so she came to the party just as other guests were leaving. It is common, even for sympathetic critics, to dodge Sitwell’s later poems and say that she was at her best in the 1920s – in the years of Façade, her playful and ingenious collaboration with the composer William Walton. That evasion happens because we do not yet have the nerve to say that the generation of Philip Larkin imposed as orthodoxy a painfully narrow, indeed incoherent, account of where poetry comes from.

  It is commonly observed that the ‘Movement’ poets of the 1950s were influenced by logical positivism – a philosophical stance that held, among other things, that knowledge must be strictly empirical, and that metaphysics and theology are meaningless. That view still has its adherents, not least among them Richard Dawkins. But the position hardly bears a second glance. An empiricist’s trust in the data of the senses will always be a matter of faith. It is undoubtedly right to believe in facts, but there is no way to get to that belief empirically. These philosophers refused to admit that beyond what we see and beyond the structures of language, we assume (as they silently assumed) another metaphysical authority for knowing. Under the influence of logical positivism, many critics spoke of Sitwell’s expansive rhetoric and religious claims as ‘unearned’ – a notion that has dogged her reputation for sixty years. They insisted that good poetry lay in small gestures and close observation. A taste for empiricism can indeed produce some wonderful poetry, but it can also lead to an obtuseness among reviewers and critics – it promotes an impoverished conception of the real to which poetry may speak. And so our recent literary history still echoes with the donnish cry, ‘It just won’t do!’

  Of the great poets of her generation, Sitwell was the easiest to knock off the pedestal. She was a flamboyant, combative aristocrat and, better still, she was a woman; therefore, she served as a critical soft target. Attacking her was a way of attacking the influence of Yeats, Pound, and Eliot without taking on their more fortified reputations. She remarked at the end of her life: ‘I am resigned to the fact that people who don’t know me loathe me. Perhaps it is because I am a woman who dares to write poetry. It must be awfully annoying to a man who wants to write and can’t to see this horrid old lady who can write poetry.’6

  However, Edith Sitwell has continued to have some shrewd admirers. One of her earlier biographers, Victoria Glendinning, believed that Sitwell published more poems than she needed and that this has clouded her legacy, but she added, ‘I believe that if the world of literary criticism knew nothing but, say, her twelve finest poems, she would have an unquestioned, uncategorized place on anyone’s Parnassus.’7

  In the pages that follow, I have taken the view that Sitwell is a writer who matters – enormously. Although she was eccentric and savagely amusing, I do not want to settle for a portrait of quirks or a compilation of quips. I have dwelt not just on her odd family and childhood, but on her friends Helen Rootham, Siegfried Sassoon, and Pavel Tchelitchew as key influences. I have spent some time accounting for her reading – not least because she is often portrayed, even by friends like Stephen Spender, as amazingly talented with the sounds of language but devoid of ideas.8 Finally, I have tried to explain the evolution of her technique. For a poet such as Sitwell, the most important events in her life were the poems. This book would therefore be pointless if the reader came away without some understanding of how to read her work.

  Of course, Edith Sitwell is also keenly interesting on other fronts. Just as a personality, she was a strange combination of kindness and cruelty, courage and duplicity, simplicity and artifice. She could be funny and generous, as well as sometimes pompous and mean-spirited. She nurtured any number of rising talents, and slapped down others. She was by turns compassionate and cutting; she inspired devotion among most of those who knew her, but a few, legitimately, resented her.

  In the thirty years since a biography of Edith Sitwell last appeared, much new evidence has become available. Long gaps in her life can now be filled. There are many new documents pertaining to her early years. Her vast correspondence with Pavel Tchelitchew has been released from embargo, and many other collections of letters have come to light. New biographies of her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell have been written. It is time to look again at Edith Sitwell. Part of the challenge, of course, is how to do justice, both to the seriousness of her life and work, and to her playfulness. She wrote: ‘It is terrible to find oneself a solitary, highly unpopular electric eel in a pool peopled by worthy, slightly somnolent flat-fish.’9 Shame on the biographer who does no better for Edith Sitwell than the flatfish might. Her conversation and her letters ring with an anarchic laughter, which will be heard in the later chapters of this book.

  Any life worth writing about is strange. While we may observe blandly that her life and sensibility were only possible in a certain time, class, and culture, Edith Sitwell achieved a dazzling degree of originality in life and in art. There is a mystery about this individuality – how to explain a woman, who, at the last, will not submit to comparison? The idea of the definitive biography is often self-deceiving – the subject of such a book will keep many secrets, then vanish across a closed border. We would expect no less of Edith Sitwell. Her first escape was from the life that was expected of her as a young woman. Then, as the years passed, she put together a literary career unlike any other, repeatedly breaking from common paths into unexplored territory. Her themes were endurance, flight, compassion, courage. What follows is the story of that difference, that fugitive impulse towards greatness.

  1

  FACTS OF LIFE

  There is no more important fact in Edith Sitwell’s early life than that her mother did not want her. The Honourable Ida Denison’s marriage to Sir George Sitwell in November 1886 was arranged by their omnipotent mothers. The courtship consisted of two luncheons. Knowing practically nothing about sex, the beautiful seventeen-year-old found the experience shocking. She fled from her new husband, but her mother sent her straight back to him. She soon became pregnant, and gave birth to Edith Louisa Sitwell at Wood End, her mother-in-law’s house in Scarborough, on 7 September 1887. Ida’s second child, Osbert, born five years later, remembered his mother as affectionate to him, but given to ‘ungovernable, singularly terrifying rages’ with his sister.1 He believed she saw in Edith ‘a living embodiment of some past unhappiness of her own. These and other things made her cruel.’2

  In 1938, Edith Sitwell spoke of her childhood as ‘so unhappy that even now I
can hardly bear to think about it’.3 She does not give many details about the troubles of her earliest years, so we have to work around the edges and try to reason out what happened between Edith Sitwell and her mother. In 1941, she told the novelist ‘Bryher’ (Winifred Ellerman) that her mother would unleash ‘rages so violent that they would lead to a sort of cataleptic state, – first a tornado of fury, and then an immobility which was terrifying. These happened, literally, every day, and I can’t think how she lived till she was well over sixty.’4

  She wrote in 1945 to Pavel Tchelitchew that all her life she had been ‘bound hand and foot. First by my frightful mother, and then afterwards by affection, pity, and duty.’5 The language of bondage, slavery and release often comes into her stories of childhood. Although she could not pardon her parents, she could see that their lives were never free. She wrote at the end of her own life: ‘I do not wish to be cruel about a poor dead woman. I have forgiven the unhappiness long ago, and now write of it only because otherwise, after my death, much in me will be misunderstood. I now feel only pity for my mother, a poor young creature, married against her will into a kind of slave-bondage to an equally unfortunate and pitiable young man.’6 This was for public consumption; in truth, she never forgave them, especially, ‘my admirable mother, – who, each day expressed herself, though without particular meaning, in prose that might have been called Elizabethan – to her daughter, and to her helpless servants’.7

  Ida Sitwell (1869–1937) came from a wealthy family. Her grandfather, Albert Denison Conyngham, created the first Baron Londesborough in 1850, inherited £2,300,000.8 Her father, William Henry Denison, second Lord Londesborough, did his very best to spend this fortune and failed. Liking musical theatre, he backed lavish productions, and slept with actresses and girls from the music halls. He kept up a good many houses that he occupied at different times of the year: Londesborough Lodge in Scarborough, an estate at Londesborough Park in Yorkshire’s East Riding, a house in the New Forest; others at Blankney and Grimston, and, for a time, the largest house in Berkeley Square, then another in Grosvenor Square. He was created first Earl of Londesborough in the Jubilee honours of June 1887. This meant new courtesy titles for his children, among them Lady Ida Sitwell.