BOOKS
Sibyl,Muse and Delphic oracle
Harold Acton
Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions Victoria Glendinning (Weidenfeld & Nicolson pp. 393, £9.95) The adjective 'unique' is so ubiquitously misapplied that one hesitates to employ it, bin, of all the people I have known, Edith Sitwell could be so described. Certainly she would have attracted attention wherever she went, for her singular appearance was the polished outer shell of her poetry.
When I first met her in the Twenties she was tall, pale and slender with a virginal grace and an abrasive humour at odds with her innate dignity: the charm is best conveyed by Cecil Beaton's early photographs reproduced in this book. She was less famous then but already the glittering imagery of her poems had a pyrotechnical effect similar to that of Stravinsky's Oiseau de Feu.
Yeats, from his pinnacle above the cackling critics, was to praise both 'the Perpetual metamorphosis that seems an elegant artificial childhood' of her early Poems and her ultimate 'nightmare vision of the emblems of mortality'. Victoria Glendinning endorses his judgment meticulously in this biography, which is so beautifully balanced and thoroughly researched that it IS as definitive as any biography could be. The variegated foreground and background of her heroine's 77 years are etched with rare sympathy and feminine understanding. ,A bare account of her life,' she writes, would seem a text for militant feminism. She defied her parents' expectations, she lived independently without the emotional or financial backing of men, apart from her brothers,' who had their own lives and commitments.
What a sad life in retrospect, despite its eventual triumphs and the public honours Which comforted her accident-prone old age! Born in 1887, she was 26 when she broke loose from her bickering parents (immortalised in her brother Osbert's autobiography). Her affection was concentrated instead on her two brothers, but one was in the army and the other at school when she escaped from the grandeur of Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire to a poky flat in Bayswater with an allowance of £100 a year from her father, Sir George, and the moral support of the cultured Helen Rootham, her former governess. From Pembridge Mansions in Moscow Road she published her early poems and launched the anthology Wheels, a controversial counterblast to Georgian Poetry. Her poems were reviewed Widely, if not perceptively, from her debut. She contributed sprightly articles to the Popular press to keep the pot boiling but she was a poet first and foremost, an 'abbess of the nightingales', as Sir Sacheverell called her.
Individual fantasy tinged her repertory of anecdotes, as when at the age of four she fell in love with a peacock and walked through the garden with her arms round his neck.
When the bird abandoned her for a peahen she had her 'first experience of faithlessness'. All her life she was to be jilted by peacocks in human form, and Mrs Glendinfling traces their influence on her writing. Her relations with painters were perhaps the most intense, though I would not agree that 'Edith and Wyndham Lewis were made for each other.' They stimulated each other creatively at a crucial period, but the stimulus soon turned sour, leaving bitterness and merciless mockery on both sides. She could never forgive his Apes of God. With Alvaro Guevara (`Chile') there was a more fruitful rapport, and his portrait of her, painted in 1916, is a striking evocation of the editor of Wheels in Pembridge Mansions.
Edith Sitwell reminded one of Bacon's dictum: 'There is no excellent beauty that has not some strangeness in the proportion.' Writers vied with each other in descriptions of her physique with varying emphasis on her long thin nose, 'delicate, sword-like' according to Denton Welch, 'longer than an ant-eater's' according to Lytton Strachey. Virginia Woolf supplied a felicitous vignette: 'She is like a clean hare's bone that one finds in a moor with emeralds stuck about it. She is infinitely tapering and distinguished and old maidish and hysterical and sensitive.' Elizabeth Bowen thought she looked like 'a high altar on the move.' She was painted and photographed so often that her appearance was familiar to thousands who never read her poems. From her elaborate hats and costumes and gigantic rings they might have imagined that she lived in insolent luxury (as Balzac would say), whereas, except on visits to Renishaw and Montegufoni, she was a homeless fugitive in shabby rooms until she migrated to the hospitable Sesame Club. In fact, as she herself remarked, Edith was 'the poor member of a rich family.'
Frustrated in her strong maternal instincts, immensely kind and far more generous than her limited means allowed, she collected all sorts of protégés in whom she discerned some talent. Many fell by the wayside or succeeded, like Tom Driberg, in a different career, and while they were in favour she would tolerate no animadversion: my lack of enthusiasm for her hero Tchelichew caused a regrettable breach and her dedication of a poem to myself was removed in consequence. Happily it was restored in later years when the breach was healed.
Pavel Tchelichew was the most flamboyant of her many peacocks and Mrs Glendinning's treatment of this complex episode would provide abundant material for psychological fiction of absorbing interest. Gertrude Stein, who specialised in spotting genius, decided that Tchelichew fell short of her criteria and passed him on to Edith, who promptly became infatuated with him and his painting. She campaigned on his behalf with indomitable resolution and persistence, arranging exhibitions for him, and persuading friends to buy his work. Edith was his ideal model and his portraits of her are probably his masterpieces. The melodramatic moods and tantrums of this very Russian Russian — a truly Chekhovian character — obsessed her for the next couple of decades. He played on her emotions as the wind on an Aeolian harp. Their high-pitched correspondence was a solace and a restorative distraction during the last world war. In the year 2000, when it may be published, survivors will be privileged to follow its wavering course, of which Mrs Glendinning gives a fascinating summary. The painter called the poet his Delphic oracle, Dame Blanche, Sibyl, beepriestess, 'my greatest friend of heart and brain', and she visualised herself as a Vittoria Colonna, a 'spiritual confidante' to this modern Michelangelo. Unfortunately he was homosexual, and when they met again in New York after the war he insulted and humiliated her. Magnanimously, Edith forgave her paranoid 'Boyar'. Undoubtedly his letters had inspired her new vein of poetry which won her academic acclaim and three honorary degrees. The mantle of mystical sibyl suited her, and she dressed up to the role on her triumphal tours of America, where she received more vociferous plaudits than at home. Mrs Glendin fling's account of these is exhilarating: we rejoice in her encounter with Marilyn Monroe and her conquest of Hollywood, so refreshing after her battles with 'silly little Bloomsburys' which consumed far too much of her time and take up too much space in her biography. In every way she was superior to those who attacked her. Reading about these literary skirmishes, I thanked my stars that I was far away.
The supreme virtue of this illuminating book is that it sends one straight back to Edith Sitwell's poems. Her admirers will succumb again to their enchantment, and one hopes that those for whom Edith Sitwell is but a name will be beguiled into her world of pure fantasy and haunting music.
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