Her Own Most Inspired Poem

By Melvin Maddocks

EDITH SITWELL by Victoria Glendinning; Knopf; 393 pages; $17.95

Critic F.R. Leavis once remarked, "The Sitwells belong to the history of publicity, rather than that of poetry." He was accurate, but incomplete: to be a Sitwell was also to elevate self-dramatization to the state of an art. Edith Sitwell made the case for herself and her younger brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, with no trace of corrupting modesty: "We all have the remote air of a legend."

To Biographer Victoria Glendinning, Edith was her own most inspired poem, and she once described herself in a cascade of fanciful imagery: "Tides ran in her blood, her nature was tempestuous ...

and changeable as water. In her black dress, with her slim body and her sudden silences, she might, indeed, have seemed one of the dark and mournful shadows that haunted the house, one of its presages of doom ..." The Sitwell mystique centered on her extraordinary physical presence. Six feet tall, with the beaky, piercing look of a falcon, Edith would have appeared a freak if she had tried to resemble ordinary human beings. Instead she turned herself into something marvelously Gothic. She wore cowled headpieces, gold brocade robes, huge jet and ivory rings, and stared the world down with Byzantine eyes.

Cecil Beaton, for whose camera she seemed to have been invented, described her as "a tall, graceful scarecrow with the hands of a mediaeval saint." She appeared to have sprung fully formed from the battlements and spires of her childhood home, Renishaw Hall, like a figure in a tapestry.

Edith saw herself as a self-appointed champion of the arts against the hordes of barbarians.

She had a genius for attracting important people to her crusade. For 18 years the elegantly impoverished daughter of Renishaw lived in unfashionable Bayswater. Her literary teas Evelyn Waugh summed up tersely as "stale buns and no chairs." Yet what names eagerly scrambled up the dingy stairs to knock on her "nasty green door." T.S. Eliot, Ravel, Diaghilev, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, William Butler Yeats were among the Olympians one might have met at the Sitwells' salons.

To be Edith's protege--like the young Dylan Thomas or the expatriate Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, whom she loved for 30 years with all her virgin heart --was to become the object of an awesome and sometimes smothering loyalty, feudal in its fierceness.

To be a Sitwell enemy was to be black listed, possibly sued, certainly well cursed.

"The dregs of the literary population have risen as one worm to insult me," Edith stormed in a typical rhetorical outburst.

Sitting in bed with her notebooks, she scribbled about anything and everything to pay off her creditors and hold the attention of her entranced public. There was her verse, her superior historical guide (Bath), two biographies of queens (Victoria of England, Fanfare for Elizabeth) and a novel about Jonathan Swift (I Live Under a Black Sun).

When World War II came, Edith knitted socks, while listening to Debussy on her wind-up gramophone and downing large tumblers of gin. The Sitwell legend that had persevered since World War I seemed ready for retirement, along with the Empire.

Edith had other ideas. She took her act, "The Fabulous Sitwells," to the States and, with Osbert, soon had Americans happily paying $35 a ticket to hear her recite the poetry of Fac,ade through megaphones to the accompaniment of William Walton's score. Everything Edith did became news, from converting to Roman Catholicism at 68 to spending a most congenial visit in Hollywood with Marilyn Monroe. She pronounced the actress "a little Spring-ghost, an innocent fertility-daemon, the vegetation spirit that was Ophelia."

In her old age, top-heavy with all those mantled gowns and Plantagenet hats, Edith got into the bad habit of falling, like a great wounded bird. She barely finished her autobiography, Taken Care Of, before she died in 1964 at 77, leaving the question unanswered: Was she a first-rank poet or merely a masterpiece of English eccentricity?

Both, says Glendinning. Yet the biographer cannot quite convince the reader because she has not quite convinced herself. She praises her subject for perceiving the world as a symbolist garden, but agrees with a cousin of Edith's that she "didn't care much for flowers unless she could make a phrase of them." For the later "Poems of the Atomic Age," she declares Edith "a modern seer, the interpreter of suffering humanity," but notes her "soft-focus mythology." What Glendinning does do wholeheartedly is convince her reader that the Sitwell persona could never have been created unless Edith deeply and passionately cared about poetry. In a prose age, this stands as achievement enough.

Excerpt I f s h e f e l t t h a t s h e w a s f r e a k i s h a n d d e f o r m e d , nothing that happened to her ever persuaded her that she was deceived. Nevertheless, Virgil Thomson, among others, thought of her a s ' s e n s u a l l y a w a r e . ' It is possible that Edith's friends were mistaken in their assumption that she was 'a hardened virgin' by the time she fell in love with Tchelitchew. It is possible in the same way that it is possible that Elizabeth I was not a virgin queen. As an old woman, Edith was found weeping one day by her secretary; when asked what was the matter, she said she wept because she had never known physical love, 'and I feel I was made for it.' In a way she was; she had a loyal and loving and passionate nature. But she was trapped in her strange physique, and in her music and po etry, she was the abbess of t h e n i g h t i n g a l e s .

-- By Melvin Maddocks

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