The E in Edith

TAKEN CARE OF by Edith Sitwell. 239 pages. Arheneum. $5.95.

"Oh, why don't they bury us?" sighs Dame Edith Sitwell in the final chapter of these memoirs, completed shortly before her death last December at the age of 77. "It'd be warmer there." It would be sizzling, as a matter of fact, wherever Dame Edith happened to be. For almost half a century she spat fire and spouted verses that perceptibly elevated the social and intellectual temperature of her times. In this autobiography, a thing of brilliant shreds and banal patches, Dame Edith throws a harsh new light on the life of the poet and the genesis of the eccentric. And incidentally applies to her contemporaries a number of nifty posthumous hotfoots.

The Queen Chinee. Eccentricity was first nature to a Sitwell. Edith's potty papa, for instance, tried to chirk up the landscape of his 5,000-acre estate in Derbyshire by painting blue Chinese ideographs on a herd of white cows. "Poor little 'E' " came along, and he decided to redecorate his gangling and disjointed daughter. When she was eleven he fitted her from head to foot with orthopedic braces designed to realign her physique--not omitting a steel clamp that gripped her nose and was "regulated by a lock-and-key system."

After a few months in this "Bastille of steel," the child developed a violent temper and symptoms of neurasthenia--whenever she heard a piece of displeasing music, she quietly vomited. But she also developed a precocious passion to become "a genius"--if possible, a poetic genius. In 1923, riots attended her first public recitation of a clamjamfry called Fac,ade:

The sound of the onycha

When the phoca has the pica

In the palace of the Queen Chinee!

Edith and her younger brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell thereupon established a literary cult of three, "the Sit-wells." Edith was its high priestess, and in preparation for the part she fitted herself from head to foot with psychological braces: floor-length gowns cut from upholstery material, turbans and toques and tippets of excited hue, finger rings containing chunks of aquamarine the size of duck eggs. In full regalia, she looked like Lyndon B. Johnson dressed up as Elizabeth I.

A Race of Poems. Enclosed in her psychic armor. Edith ventured forth into the world of letters and had soon met everybody worth meeting. In Taken Care Of, the great and the ingrate are taken care of with insuperable invective.

On Novelist D. H. Lawrence: "The head of the Jaeger school of literature, since he is hot, soft, and woolly. But Jaeger woolens are unshrinkable by time, whereas the works of Mr. Lawrence are not."

On Critic F. R. Leavis: "His pronouncements are a constant pleasure to one. He has a transcendental gift, even when he is writing sense, of making it appear to be nonsense."

On Dame Edith, Dame Edith is less severe. On her own evidence, she was a mortally serious Christian and a ferociously committed artist, a childless woman who lay in her bed and labored every day for six hours a day, all year for more than 40 years, to bring forth a race of poems. The worst of them are idiot brainchildren afflicted with echolalia; the best of them are fierce and radiant creatures of the metaphysical imagination. In Dirge for the New Sunrise, dated the day the bomb fell on Hiroshima, Dame Edith writes in her ultimate Miltonic manner:

And the ray from the heat came soundless, shook the sky

As if in search for food, and squeezed the stems

Of all that grows on the earth till they were dry--And drank the marrow of the bone:

The eyes that saw, the lips that kissed are gone--Or black as thunder lie and grin at the murdered Sun.

Dame Edith in her last best years struck the attitude of a withered grand Cassandra. Her memoirs involuntarily reveal that in this, as in all her cold, impressive poses, it was seldom a grown woman who spoke. It was more often poor little E, getting even with the world for making her poor little E.

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