Edith Sitwell Read online

  The conversation-piece presented a family stable and at ease, but this was hardly the case. Worried about lawsuits over mining leases, Sir George decided it was time for austerity at home. Christmas and birthday presents for the children were to be useful things such as soap and hairbrushes. Nearing the end of her employment, Davis denounced this as ‘downright mean’ – not least because they were told of it by her enemy, Miss King-Church.8 More importantly, from about May 1901, Sir George was himself falling apart. He experienced extreme restlessness and irritability mixed with depression. His thoughts often racing, he could not sleep and felt unable even to stay consecutive nights in the same house. It was then that Louisa Sitwell gave the unoccupied Wood End to ‘the dear invalid’.9 Sir George put his illness down to ‘over-work’.10 It is just possible that he suffered from manic depression or bipolar illness, but great caution is necessary in making retrospective diagnoses. In old age, Sachie suggested to John Pearson that the problem arose from a disastrous marriage and that Sir George might have sorted himself out with a few affairs if he had not been such a prude11 – it is hard to believe that a bad marriage would have been improved by adultery.

  Sir George’s life changed abruptly in the first years of the century. Finished as a parliamentary candidate, he took very long journeys to France, Germany, and especially Italy, where, under the eye of Henry Moat, he sought peace of mind by visiting ancient gardens. The children might not see their father for many months at a time, and when they did see him he was unresponsive. Edith’s letters to him over several years typically open as on 28 December 1902: ‘I am so glad to hear you are so much better and hope you are enjoying yourself very much abroad. We do wish you could have been with us at Christmas.’12 How bad things were in 1902 is suggested from a letter to her Aunt Florence of 26 May 1903: ‘Dear Father seems so very much better and stronger, is able to walk, and is, I think, so different to last year.’13 It seems that there were phases when he could not sleep and others when he could not even get out of bed. Sir George was not that much better in May 1903, though his daughter wanted to believe otherwise. His mother noted in her diary the arrival of ‘George looking nervous & ill, having a return of disturbing symptoms, through eating (it is supposed) some tinned food in Paris’.14

  During his long illness, Lady Sitwell did her best to help out with the children and was especially watchful of Edith: ‘On the 11th August [1903], my dear granddaughter Edith Louisa Sitwell, was confirmed at Hackness Church [Whitby], by the Bishop of Hull, a sweet & peaceful service in the lovely little church.’ A week later, on 18 August, came a sign that things might be coming right: ‘by 8.35 a.m. train, George & the three children started for Renishaw, with their governess Miss Rootham, nurse, & 4 other servants, the children so intensely happy, at going to their old home again, if only for a week.’ Sir George’s mental state was improving, but now Lady Ida was sick. She returned from a visit to Scotland on 21 September ‘overwrought & overtired & ill from internal catarrh. Dr. Salter attended & she had to keep to her bed for many days.’ By mid-January, she had broken a rib from coughing. Undeterred, she went to parties in London when she was supposed to be convalescing in Gosden. Lady Sitwell complained of her ‘callousness about her own health, & about the wishes of her husband & her Doctors’.15 Lady Ida was suffering from the tuberculosis prevalent among the Londesboroughs, and it cost her a lung.16

  In her adolescence, Edith learnt to play hide-and-seek in her relationships, as she tried not to upset the unstable Sir George or provoke the ill and bad-tempered Lady Ida. Her letters to her father are unfailingly polite, deferential, and warm-hearted, although her conversations about him with Helen and her brothers developed a very different tone. Indeed, throughout her life Edith treated friends, relatives, and even strangers, with a heroic kindness in person, but then, sometimes, with mockery or bitterness in their absence. I am reluctant to use the term ‘real’ feelings to describe the behind-the-back comments. Edith Sitwell developed an extraordinary ability to perceive suffering; its accompanying harshness was partly a way of pulling herself back from the abyss of other people’s troubles. She was defending herself against the things she had seen. This combination of kindness and cruelty is mysterious; her finest and worst qualities grew inseparable.

  Some letters to Sir George hint at her emerging skill as a writer. From Gosden House on 2 February 1903, she describes

  the village watch-maker – the quaintest old man, quite a Dickens character, very eccentric, and supposed to be unapproachable; at one time he refused to speak to anyone (he comes weekly to wind Grannie’s clocks,) however we were very amiable to him, and in return he showed us a very queer collection of old watches, mostly gold ones, and beautifully chased, some 200 years old or more, which he has picked up in various places. Other customers came in, but he was so interested in showing us his collection that he was quite oblivious to their needs. The musical watches and old repeaters were specially wonderful.17

  A sharp eye was matched by a sharp ear; she wrote on 26 November 1903: ‘I am learning an Etude of Chopin’s, my first thing of his, it is rather difficult and has to be played fast. I hope you will like it. Miss Rootham is playing now, a most beautiful thing of Rubinstein’s, she has also got Schubert-Liszt’s “Erl-King” which is quite ghastly, and she plays it so well.’18

  Edith Sitwell had come to a point where, in her class, a period of ‘finishing’ was usual, although in later years she spoke often of having been ‘finished off’. Sitwell’s cousin Veronica Gilliat (née Codrington) spoke in 1962 on This Is Your Life of how Sitwell ran away from home when she was seventeen.19 Sitwell may have felt as if she were making an escape, but it was all done with her parents’ encouragement. She and Helen Rootham spent the latter part of 1904 in Paris, staying in a pension run by a Mademoiselle de Vérey at 16 Quai de Passy, near a house once occupied by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Sitwell was pleased with her room and decorated it with picture postcards. Then came a personal make-over: ‘I have got my hair done up now, and I should like you to see it; it looks much better done up than it did hanging down,’ she told her father on 6 October. ‘I am growing eyebrows. One can see them distinctly.’ In November, Helen sent a bill for 64 francs to cover hairdressing lessons, for which were required ‘pads which were especially made to match her hair’.20 Sitwell complained in later years that a fashionably frizzed look was forced on her, but at the time she liked it. She was also taking lessons from a French cook: ‘all sorts of strange foreign receipts, for dishes that one never gets in England; for instance, she is teaching me to make a grape tart, (it is a peculiarly delicious open tart, with white grapes, and some people put whipped cream.)’ She tried this one on Sir George at Christmas to good effect. There were a number of visits to the Louvre, where she was especially drawn to Corot’s The Matinée, L’Étang, and Paysage. She was reading about the history of the revolution, as well as Racine’s Andromaque and Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. Still something of a little girl, she signed off: ‘With very best love, ever your loving “Dish” aged 17.’21

  In Paris, Edith Sitwell became friends with another of Helen’s sisters. Born in 1877, Ella Evelyn Rootham was two years younger than Helen and, like her, was known by different Christian names in different contexts. To her family, she was Ella, while to Sitwell she was, through a friendship of sixty years, always Evelyn. During the First World War, she served as a nurse and was decorated for remaining with liquid-fire victims in a hospital that was being bombed.22 She married Truels Wiel, the Norwegian vice-consul in Paris, and for a time enjoyed the glamour of the diplomatic service. However, the marriage failed, her husband left Paris, and she had to take secretarial jobs to make ends meet. Edith Sitwell and the ailing Helen came to live with her in the French capital in the 1930s, and she was very glad to have them there to share expenses. Indeed, Evelyn’s dependence on Sitwell when they were both old became a cause of exasperation, although in 1905 Sitwell thought her ‘so charming … she is very amusing, and so very pr
etty’.23

  With the Rootham sisters, Sitwell was strictly chaperoned, but it was hardly needed. Though quirky, Edith was pious and straitlaced. Later, there were men in her life whom she would gladly have married, but there is no solid evidence that she ever had sex with a man – or a woman for that matter. Helen was prudish – Osbert called her ‘censorious’24 – and there is no sign, apart from friendship and shared lodgings, that she and Sitwell ever became lovers. However, Helen was possessive of her younger friend and over the years got in the way of Sitwell’s relations with men. Helen herself had a failed engagement in the 1920s, but beyond that it is impossible to judge whether she might also have entertained a passion for Sitwell. There is, by the same token, no evidence of a sexual relationship between Sitwell and Evelyn Rootham.

  The Sitwells came together for Christmas 1904 in San Remo, where Lady Ida could have easy access to the roulette tables at Monte Carlo. Osbert had not seen Edith for six months: ‘I found my sister a changed person … Still more, though, did I notice an alteration in her way of looking at things, for her absence from home – and, as a result, the discontinuance of the perpetual nagging to which for years she had been obliged to submit – had lifted the whole range of her spirits. She knew now, she would be going away again before long.’25

  Edith Sitwell met a number of people at San Remo, among them the Princess Salm-Salm.26 An American woman born Agnes Joy, she had married a Prussian nobleman, tended the wounded on the battlefields of the American Civil War, attempted to save the life of Emperor Maximilian, and tended the wounded again in the Franco-Prussian War. She wrote a memoir and became a figure almost of legend in the late nineteenth century.27

  Sitwell’s return to Paris was complicated by one of Sir George’s sudden outbreaks of cheapness. At the end of January he disputed the bill at the pension, and Helen had to pacify the landlady. Sir George wanted to make weekly rather than monthly payments, and threatened to take his daughter out of the house altogether. Lady Ida proposed that Helen remove Edith at once to rooms elsewhere, but that was impossible: ‘Naturally Mdlle de Vérey would keep our luggage until the bill is paid.’28 Helen refused to take up Sir George’s argument with de Vérey, writing to him: ‘She has not been disagreeable to us, on the contrary she has acted with much delicacy and showed real kindness to Edith. But our position was none the less most humiliating and painful. I should be much obliged if you would send some money for our trainfares and our tea.’

  By 12 February, things had settled down; Sir George accepted the existing arrangements. However, the episode offers a further, unexpected glimpse into the world of Edith Sitwell and the Roothams. Sir George backed off because of a letter written by Evelyn at the urging of a prominent surgeon named Henri Albert Hartmann, who was actually treating Edith. Evelyn pleaded with Sir George not to put Helen under any strain because of its likely medical consequences. Helen followed with a letter of her own, explaining the situation. While treating Edith, Hartmann had decided that Helen Rootham was in danger of a relapse of neurasthenia, for which she had received the Mitchell treatment some years earlier.29

  Neurasthenia was first described by doctors around 1870, after which it became a common diagnosis throughout Europe and North America; Sir George himself was sometimes referred to as a neurasthenic. According to the medical historian David Schuster, it was thought to be caused by the depletion of a nervous energy produced by the digestive system and distributed throughout the body by the nervous system.30 Symptoms included insomnia, depression, fatigue, indigestion, muscle pain, headaches, inability to concentrate, and general anxiety. A basket diagnosis, neurasthenia included what would now be seen as separate conditions – chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and post-partum depression. A neurologist and novelist, Dr Weir Mitchell contrived a treatment for the illness that became known as the ‘rest-cure’: six to eight weeks of complete bedrest, isolation from family and friends, a diet of fattening foods, massage, and sometimes electric shocks to prevent muscular atrophy.

  Helen Rootham may have suffered from a mental illness. On the other hand, Dr Weir Mitchell’s ideas were more pernicious and constraining than any back-brace, nose-truss, or ear-spring that Mr Ernst could come up with. Mitchell argued that women were by nature less intelligent than men and should not compete with them for fear of over-exertion; this meant that they should not think deeply, enter colleges, or join professions because of the danger of depleting their nervous energy. He botched the treatment of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an American author best known for her short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, for what would now be thought post-partum depression. His prescription to her is notorious: ‘live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time … Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours’ intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live.’31 Rootham may have been the sane patient of mad doctors. For Edith Sitwell, fear of neurasthenia dovetailed with Tubby’s insistence that she spend a great portion of her day horizontal. She later interpreted the troubles of her youth as leading directly to neurasthenia. She wrote in 1944: ‘My nerves were completely broken, and my nervous system ruined for life before I was ten years old. This was perfectly well known to the doctors who attended me then, and to the doctors who have attended me since.’32

  Gradually taking over from Tubby, Hartmann would be involved in Sitwell’s and Rootham’s lives for many years. For the time being, Sitwell’s back was growing stronger and straighter. In January 1904, she reported to her father: ‘I have been to see Mr Tubby again, and he is delighted with my back and says it is nearly straight.’33 In late 1904 and 1905, Hartmann was similarly encouraging, at a time when she was drawing great benefit from a masseur named Arcier. Helen wrote on 2 March 1905: ‘The progress she has made since her return from San Remo is quite extraordinary, and her right shoulder is slowly but quite steadily getting on a level with the left. It’s a real happiness to watch the improvement.’ Echoing an appeal from Helen, Sitwell wrote two days later to ask Sir George ‘if I may have a month extra here so as to continue the massage, and have two months less in Germany, so as to pay the extra massage and pension’.34 Sir George sent money for another month in Paris, but pressed Helen to keep expenses down. In May, Edith reported her back ‘quite cured’;35 however, Hartmann continued the regime of braces, and a new set of ‘corsets’ was fitted in May.36 It is not known when Sitwell finally laid them aside, but if her back was so much better they cannot have been necessary for long.

  Despite the flap over the rent, these months in Paris were some of the happiest of her life. She wrote to Florence, ‘I am so busy nearly all day here practising and learning French, but I lie down a lot, too, and my back is most wonderfully better.’37 She attended many concerts, including one in April by the acclaimed Jan Kubelík, a twenty-four-year-old Czech ‘otherwise known as “the Violin-Cello Man”! he played very wonderfully, and did impossible feats on his violin.’38 Helen was stretching Sitwell’s own talent on the piano as far as it would go. On 6 February she asked Sir George to give permission for extra music-lessons. ‘If I were only giving her one or two lessons a week I should not think it necessary, but as I work with her every day at the piano I think it better for her that she should have another influence besides mine. I should like to choose a teacher of the German school.’39 Rootham believed Edith Sitwell had a considerable talent and could achieve a professional standard.

  On 18 May, Sitwell and Rootham joined Sir George and Lady Ida at Bad Nauheim, a spa town near Frankfurt. From there, Sitwell and Rootham went on to Berlin in June, where they took rooms from Fräulein von Versen (a name that serendipitously means ‘of verses’) in Altonaer Strasse 3, near the Tiergarten and the zoological gardens. Sitwell took lessons from a master pianist named Berkovitch, and set to work on the language, although it ultimately defeated her. The city itself fascinated her: she was charmed by designs traced above
the doorways of old houses, especially one of Phoebus and his chariot, and she delighted in the balconies full of geraniums and hydrangeas. Berlin offered many galleries and museums; Sitwell especially admired an exhibit of landscapes and seascapes by the Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin, who is now mainly remembered as an allegorist. Nonetheless some artwork was incomprehensible, as she told her father: ‘One afternoon we went to see an exhibition of Impressionist paintings; they were really funny, and at first we didn’t know that they weren’t intended to be.’40 The word ‘we’ indicates that Helen, too, was struggling to understand modern art.

  They returned to England to spend the last of the summer at Renishaw. Sitwell took long walks with her father each afternoon. She was enthusiastic about his most recent Italian purchases, three fountains and ‘some “new” “old” furniture’, remarking to Florence that they ‘do improve the place so’. Lady Ida was upbeat and busy: ‘Mother has been doing quite a lot of gardening, and takes such an interest in it. She gardens nearly every day.’41

  On 6 September 1905, the day before her eighteenth birthday, Sitwell and Rootham took the night train back to Berlin. They stayed there, with some breaks, through the following year and possibly into the first months of 1907. Edith wrote to Sir George on 4 November 1905 to report on her reading and her dancing lessons. She added whimsically: ‘How lovely it must be at Venice. Please don’t let your uncertainty as to the quantity that would be needed, prevent your sending us some figs. I think we could manage to consume as many as you could send through the post. You need not be afraid of sending too many.’42 She and Helen appear to have remained in Germany until the late spring of 1906, before returning, for a time, to England.