Edith Sitwell Page 9
Extremely quirky himself, Sickert defended artists and their maligned temperament against a misunderstanding world: ‘Haberdashers have been known to be regrettably irregular in their domestic and financial relations. Yet I have never heard invectives against the “haberdashing temperament”.’28 Edith Sitwell was influenced by his grittiness, which shows through in her taste for toughness, even ferocity, in art. For example, she could never fully settle into the Bloomsbury scene in the 1920s: ‘They’ve civilised all their instincts away. They don’t any longer know the difference between one object and another. They’ve civilised their senses away, too.’29 Sickert’s writing and conversation dwelt constantly on problems of technique, how to lay a brush on canvas to greater effect. Sitwell had spent much of her own life thus far attempting to achieve an effective technique at the keyboard. That such technical standards should exist for poetry made perfect sense to her. The essays she wrote years later on ‘vowel-technique’ are sometimes subjective and hard to follow, but she was trying to address the refinements of sound in language that lie deeper than scansion, as well as attempting to articulate her own sense of the medium. She was doing her best to explain something that was happening in her ear just as Sickert had so often attempted to explain what his hand had to do for his eye.
In 1907, Sickert established a studio at 19 Fitzroy Street, where he and his friends exhibited their works through the year under the formula, ‘Mr Sickert at Home’. His original partners in this enterprise were Spencer Gore, William Rothenstein, Albert Rothenstein, Harold Gilman, Walter Russell, Nan Hudson, and Ethel Sands. They were soon joined by Lucien Pissarro, the son of Camille Pissarro. Sitwell must have attended some of these ‘at homes’ with Swinton. She may also have gone to them with Constance Lane, then a student at the Slade, where her tutors included Henry Tonks and William Orpen,30 both associates of Sickert’s. In fact, like Sickert and Sargent, Orpen had painted a portrait of Elsie Swinton. Augustus John was a friend of Sickert’s, and whether she met him then or not Sitwell attended an exhibit of his work at the Chenil Gallery, bringing young Sacheverell with her.31 In due course, Fitzroy Street became a haunt of Edith’s future friend, suitor, and finally arch-enemy, Wyndham Lewis. The art critic Clive Bell became an occasional visitor, as did his wife, Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell, whose paintings had won Sickert’s admiration when exhibited at the New English Art Club (NEAC) in 1909. Later, Nina Hamnett, a particular friend of the Sitwells, was a regular exhibitor at Fitzroy Street.32
A sketch of Osbert Sitwell from the 1920s. The artist is thought to be Nina Hamnett
How often Edith Sitwell attended the ‘at homes’ is not certain, and, since she was often on the continent, there were stretches when she did not attend at all. Something of the sort is implied in an invitation Sickert issued to her c. May 1913. She had brought Inez Chandos-Pole, a distant relative, to the Carfax Gallery where, like a ‘cuckoo’, she began talking big to Sickert. Edith wrote to Osbert: ‘I found he had been much amused. He said the atmosphere was much too rarefied for him to live in, so he left – as he found Inez knew so much more about pictures than he did!! He then said he thought people who talked so grandly about pictures, generally knew very little, for, as William Morris once said to him: “A picture is well drawn, or it is badly drawn – that is all there is to say.”’ Nevertheless, Sickert was always glad to see a Sitwell: ‘he hopes we will come to look upon Fitzroy Street as an institution, to which we can always go when we have nothing better to do. So you and I will go together, some time. I must say my nerves were fairly shattered by not finding him there on Saturday, and being left to the mercy of what he calls the “jeunesse.” He says they have turned him into an academician!!!’
The suggestion here is that Edith had little to do with the younger artists; however, she had certainly made a friend of Albert Rothenstein, soon to anglicise his name to Rutherston. In the same letter to Osbert, she describes a lunch with him: ‘He was wearing a new pair of trousers, which were the cause of much excitement to Mrs. Hutchinson, who watched him coming along the street, and called out of the window: “Oh, Albert, you are smart. What a lovely new pair of trousers!” Mr. Rothenstein was rather disgusted with Isadora Duncan about her children’s funeral. He said he thought that at the back of her mind was the germ of a thought: “What a feather in my cap!”’33 An outgoing and dandyish figure, Rutherston remained a friend, and he did some illustration for the Sitwells in the 1920s. His nephew, John Rothenstein, later served as director of the Tate Gallery.34
‘Mrs Hutchinson’ is Mary Hutchinson, a writer herself and a cousin of Lytton Strachey’s; she had affairs with Clive Bell and with both Aldous and Maria Huxley. While at the Slade School, Constance Lane became a friend of Dora Carrington, which may have been how Sitwell became acquainted with Hutchinson. Oddly enough, Edith Sitwell’s and Mary Hutchinson’s faces would both eventually appear in the Boris Anrep mosaics at the National Gallery: Hutchinson on the halfway landing in the Awakening of the Muses, and Edith Sitwell as The Sixth Sense in the North Vestibule where she walks across a tree branch over a ravine, reading a book of poems, unconcerned by the dragon, swooping raven, and blowing winds.35 Friendship with Mary Hutchinson indicates that by 1913 Sitwell knew her way around the artistic circles of London.
Roger Fry was an old friend of Sickert and a leading figure in Bloomsbury. It is not clear when Sitwell made his acquaintance, but she was reading his essays from the beginning of 1911. He had recently organised the landmark exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Gallery between November 1910 and January 1911. Attended by over twenty-five thousand people, this show and its successor in 1912 introduced to England the works of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse, and Rouault – doing so over the howls of many art experts and journalists. Most of Sickert’s younger associates were enthusiastic, while he himself remained politely unsurprised about artists well established in Paris. In fact, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin were already dead.36
Unlike the girl who had found the Berlin exhibition of Impressionists in June 1905 ‘funny’, Edith Sitwell now took modern art very seriously. She made notes from Sickert’s article on the exhibition in January 1911, which contained the remarkable dictum: ‘Deformation or distortion in drawing is a necessary quality in hand-made art. Not only is this deformation or distortion not a defect. It is one of the sources of pleasure and interest. But it is so on one condition: that it result from the effort for accuracy of an accomplished hand, and the inevitable degree of human error in the result.’37 She took notes on an essay by Manet’s friend and biographer Théodore Duret. From Fry’s article on ‘Post-Impressionism’ in the Fortnightly Review (1 May 1911), she copied out a key passage: ‘[the problem for painters] is to discover the visual language of the imagination. To discover, that is, what arrangements of form and colour are calculated to stir the imagination most deeply through the stimulus given to the sense of sight. This is exactly analogous to the problem of music, which is to find what arrangements of sound will have the greatest evocative power.’ Many years later, she returned to this paragraph and underscored it.
On the surface, it is odd that a musician should be learning from painters how to become a poet, but the ideas underlying Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art are bound up with the Symbolist movement in the arts, with which Sitwell had had her first serious contact in the works of Debussy. In this particular notebook,38 she seems to be struggling towards a theory of Symbolism. Among the eighty-eight pages of transcribed poems and essays by Yeats, she includes this comment of his on Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’: ‘So when man’s desire to rest from spiritual labour, and his thirst to fill his art with mere sensation and memory, seem upon the point of triumph, some miracle transforms them to a new inspiration; and here and there among the pictures born of sensation and memory is the murmuring of a new ritual, the glimmering of new talismans and symbols [her emphasis]’. There are also notes from Arthur Symons, the poet whose critical works in
troduced British readers to the French Symbolist poets. There are transcriptions of twenty-seven poems by Baudelaire and notes on her reading of many more Symbolist poets, among them Albert Samain, Gustave Kahn, Maurice Maeterlinck, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Rémy de Gourmont, and André Fontainas. This is the sort of reading that was having a decisive effect on Pound and Eliot at much the same time.39
Sitwell’s immersion in French poetry taught her to seek out images that are fragmentary, sometimes dreamlike, suggestive rather than representative, and synaesthetic (that is, crossing the usual borders of sensory experience). It encouraged her to regard the poet or the artist as isolated from normal society and often burdened by genius. It led her to believe that the relation of one sound to another had an enormous power to evoke meanings beyond any direct statement a poem might make. In that sense, she regarded the writing of a poem rather like an expert performance of music, requiring, in Sachie’s phrase, ‘the attack and entry of a virtuoso pianist’.40 Towards the end of her career, this sense of her work put her very much at odds with younger critics who felt she was repeating herself by returning to a limited group of images and symbols, while she understood her poetry of that period, with its highly individual explorations of rhythm and sound, as going from strength to strength.
In 1911 and 1912, Edith Sitwell was hardly in danger of repeating herself – she had written almost nothing. To understand her early efforts it is necessary to introduce yet another scholarly and eccentric cousin on Sir George’s side of the family. Joan Wake (1884–1974), daughter of the robustly named Sir Herwald Craufurd Wake of Courteenhall, Northamptonshire, was essentially the founder of the Northamptonshire Record Society in 1920, and she made a large contribution to its publications over the next forty years. ‘She was stockily and heavily built, with a determined jaw. Clothes were of little interest to her, though she always carried her best hat in a box on her motorcycle.’ She was eventually granted honorary degrees by Oxford and Leicester and was made a CBE in recognition of her historical research,41 which, of course, belonged more to the world of Sir George Sitwell and Captain George Swinton than to that of Edith Sitwell.
Family visits threw the two barely acquainted cousins together:
In January 1913, Edith came to stay at Courteenhall – Bad Weather, what to do with her? I found out she was musical. I thought I was at that time so we played a great many duets. Then I dragged her out for a walk … We started to talk about poetry and she started to quote it – line after line, verse after verse, poem after poem poured from her lips. At last I said: ‘Edith! I don’t believe music is your line of country – I think it’s poetry. Have you ever written any?’ ‘One line!’ she said dramatically. ‘Out with it!’ said I – and out it came. I haven’t the slightest recollection of it, but I approved, and told her so, and said she had better go on – she did – and apparently that day – anyhow before her visit came to an end, for one of her early poems which I have in her handwriting is written on Courteenhall note-paper.42
Sitwell was being shy when she said she had written only one line of poetry. In one of her early notebooks is a short poem marked ‘Nocturne by myself 16 June: 1912’:
The tremulous gold of stars within your hair
Are golden bees flown from the hive of night
Finding the blossoms of your eyes more fair
Than all the pale flowers folded from the light.
And in your voice more fresh than roses, sing
The vanished flute-songs of the withered spring.43
This alone of Edith Sitwell’s earliest poems is included in her Collected Poems of 1957 – perhaps it was her first poem or the first that showed any skill. In its final form the poem is entitled ‘Serenade’; the word ‘golden’ in line two is switched to yellow, and the last two lines are replaced with much more vigorous ones:
Then, Sweet, awake, and ope your dreaming eyes
Ere those bright bees have flown and darkness dies.44
The poem is followed in the notebook by two others in a similar vein, dated 18 and 21 June 1912, as well as transcriptions from Sappho, Swinburne and Poe, all of whose influence is obvious in these poems of dreamy eroticism. The notebook also contains transcriptions from Walter de la Mare, the Homeric Hymns translated by Andrew Lang, the poems of Richard Middleton, and the plays of Massinger and Ford. Pasted into the notebook is a Tennysonian piece, ‘In Fancy’s Tower’, which contains the following stanza:
As in a mirror one may spy
The world’s great pageant rolling by,
Or, turning to the past, may know
The lives that men lived long ago:
A scytheless Time sets back the hour
In Fancy’s Tower.
This poem, so characteristic of its author, is marked ‘by my Father’. This was perhaps the last time Edith Sitwell would write or speak of him with uncomplicated pride.
7
THE GREAT WARS
‘When I am told by the left-wing boys that I can’t write poetry because I have not proletarian experiences, I often wonder how many of them, at the age of 17, have been sent to pawn false teeth – parental false teeth!!!!! You get 10/5 on them. And whisky was then 12/6d.’1 Edith Sitwell’s dismal family life was proceeding in parallel to the rich artistic one described in the last chapter. As a story, it is hard to credit that of the false teeth but Sacheverell confirms, for example, that Lady Ida sent Edith to the golf course near Renishaw Hall to buy brandy.2
Drinking was only one problem. Lady Ida was also a gambler, and her expenses exceeded her personal income of five hundred pounds, which included an allowance from Sir George. According to one of her lawyers, Sir George had cleared her debts ‘over and over again’, most recently in 1903 when he arranged a loan for her secured by an insurance policy on her life. The premiums came to a hefty £330 per year for ten years.3 With that loan not nearly paid off, Lady Ida’s bills mounted to about two thousand pounds, and she was in debt to the servants. She was afraid to tell Sir George as he had made it clear he would not rescue her again. Indeed, they had reached a point where in another generation divorce would be the sole solution. She wrote: ‘It seems as if Fate is against me. Naturally, George is very angry with me, and rightly so.’4
As their family life turned poisonous, a few pleasures were still possible, especially during visits to Italy, which included time at Montegufoni but also a memorable trip to Sicily in March 1910, where Edith and Osbert watched again and again plays performed in a disused church by a member of the then-famous Grasso family of actors. Sir George and Lady Ida were back at the hotel, playing bridge with an amicable Polish count and his wife who later became visitors at Scarborough and Renishaw. According to Osbert, Sir George was easier to get along with when travelling, as his mind was free of worries. Osbert recalled a particular moment of benevolence in Sicily when he clumsily dropped and broke a piece of amber his father had just bought, but there was no reproach.5
These were at best happy interludes. London was an exciting place for her, but Edith felt imprisoned during her long spells in Scarborough. She wrote to Sachie on 15 November 1910: ‘I do wish Osbert wouldn’t write Mother cross letters. At least, I think it would be better not. I am so terrified of Father turning round, and saying we are not to go to London at all. And after all, he is extravagant. I wouldn’t say so for worlds, for you know I’m devoted to him, but he is. And we are all being punished for it more than he is, for I at any rate, will have to be here for two months! It is hard.’6 Sudden changes of plan and being stuck in Scarborough became a grievance for her over a number of years. She wrote to Osbert on 13 February 1912 from a boarding house at 18 Langham Street in London: ‘Do you suppose I have been allowed to go in peace to Miss Rootham’s? – No, bless you! I was just standing at the door in my hat and new sealskin-rabbit coat of ravishing beauty, when a telegram was thrust into my hand: “Father wants you to stay in home till Thursday, then come to Curzon [Hotel].” I suppose that means Scarborough. I wish someone would h
eave half a brickbat at both of them. I wish I had given them the measles.’7
Visits to her grandmother had at least offered peace and quiet, but that world was winding down. First, Edith’s ‘Aunt Puss’ (Lady Hamner – one of Lady Sitwell’s sisters) died on 17 May 1911. Edith wrote to Osbert from Bournemouth: ‘Auntie Puss died suddenly early yesterday morning. It was a shock to Grannie and Auntie Georgie [Georgiana Thomas, another of Lady Sitwell’s sisters]. Father is being pompous, and coming home for the funeral. Poor Auntie Puss! But still, she was 84, which after all, is a great age. Of course, as you can well imagine, Auntie Floss had a field-day yesterday, with prayers and tracts, and Bible readings.’8 Childless herself, Aunt Puss had always made a quarterly gift to Osbert and Sachie of a gold sovereign wrapped in tissue paper. At her death, she left everything to Sir George and the boys including 1500 such sovereigns, all wrapped, inside a cabinet: as Osbert noted, enough for quarterly gifts for the next 350 years. Edith was left nothing.9
Lady Sitwell herself was failing. Osbert recalled, ‘it was sad for those who loved her to see one on whom so many had depended, now dependent on others. Her firm will and able brain had not failed her, but an immense fatigue assailed her. Though her hair was white now, she did not look older, but the passage of the last few years had made her finer, had given a sense of transparency and had deepened her expression of resignation and sweetness.’10 Her death on 2 November 1911 took from Edith one of her chief protectors. Moreover, Sir George had listened to his mother’s advice as he listened to that of no one else. Her counsels of patience and moderation might have helped him protect his family from the storm that was gathering.