BIOGRAPHY: ROBERT O'BYRNE reviews Edith Sitwell: Avant garde poet, English geniusBy Richard Greene Virago, 512pp. £25
EDITH SITWELL’S career demonstrates all the hazards of celebrity. Writing of her and her two brothers in 1932, literary critic FR Leavis sniffed “the Sitwells belong to the history of publicity rather than of poetry”. Two years later, Geoffrey Grigson still more savagely dismissed the trio with the comment that they reflected “a society where dilettante art-worship is synonymous with culture”.
It cannot be denied that the Sitwell siblings were assiduous in their pursuit of headlines. Collectively and individually, in the years after the end of the first World War, they demonstrated greater flair for generating publicity than almost any other author of their generation, and certainly more than all other members of their class. It helped that they were eager to provide an opinion on all sorts of topics, that they possessed striking names and appearances, and that they were aristocratic by birth. But these attributes meant they quickly became more famous as characters than as writers. As late as the 1950s Edith and the older of her brothers, Osbert, were jointly able to give sell-out readings in the United States, primarily on the strength of their names. This double-act, incidentally, greatly peeved the youngest Sitwell, Sacheverell, who felt he had been unfairly excluded from an opportunity to garner popular notice.
But as many of today's celebrities can attest, the downside of publicity is that it cannot be managed. Hence, from the time of its first performance in 1923, Edith Sitwell's most famous work, the poetry series Facade, which was accompanied by William Walton's music, tended to meet with a mixed response from audiences, part reverence, part guffaw. One has a feeling that the author, who recited her poems through a megaphone protruding from a decorated screen, was hoping the night would result in outrage similar to that witnessed among the audience at the premiere of Stravinsky's Sacre du printempsin Paris 20 years before. In the event, the only person to walk out was Noël Coward, who thereby not only made sure he was mentioned in the occasion's subsequent press coverage but also ridiculed the Sitwells as the Swiss Family Whittlebot in a theatre revue three months later. Eight years after, they were portrayed with still greater cruelty as Osmund, Phoebus and Harriet Finnian Shaw in Wyndham Lewis's satiric roman à clef, The Apes of God. This was not how serious artists were meant to be treated.
Whenever her efforts to gain attention did not pan out as wished, Edith Sitwell’s inclination was to react with indignation. She and her brothers lacked the necessary, leavening sense of irony and could not see how their sometime posturing invited derision: “Even when I make a joke,” she gravely informed a group of American journalists in 1948, “it is from a deep conviction.”
But perhaps her greatest flaw was an inability to recognise that by forever seeking notice for her appearance and persona she diminished the chances of her literary work being given its due attention. And the truth is that as poet and prose writer alike, she was exceptionally gifted. WB Yeats esteemed her poetry, writing on the publication of the collection Gold Coast Customsin 1929, "Her language is the traditional language of literature, but twisted, torn, complicated, jerked here and there . . .". After his death, Georgie Yeats told Sitwell, "I remember the great stimulus he got from his deep admiration of your work and the affection he felt for yourself personally". Likewise she was both liked and admired by TS Eliot, and as a young man Graham Greene held her in the highest reverence.
She was also a perceptive judge of other writers, championing early the singular genius of Dylan Thomas, although with naughty ingratitude he designated a party she once held for him as being “more dukes than drinks”.
SINCE SHE WAS nothing like as wealthy as her brothers, a need to make money encouraged her to write almost too much but even her most dashed books have a distinctive flavour. So too her style of poetry, in which particular emphasis was laid on the sounds of words. It had largely fallen out of favour even before her death and is decidedly not in vogue today. But Sitwell repays reading: there is something hypnotic about her verse, especially when recited aloud as this permits the lines’ resonances to be appreciated fully.
Her new biographer, Richard Greene, rightly gives the poet due notice and thoroughly analyses many of her better-known works, placing them within the context of time and circumstance. The only criticism to be levelled in this regard is that he might have investigated a little more fully her musical inspiration: as a young woman and prior to taking up writing verse she showed singular aptitude for piano playing to a very high standard and the affinity for notes and chords clearly had an impact on her poetic output.
When it comes to the life, on the other hand, Greene is less adroit. He is inclined to treat his subject with as much reverence as did she and seems incapable ever of finding the Sitwells and their behaviour preposterous. Elizabeth Bowen once described Edith Sitwell as looking like “a high altar on the move”. If this is so, then Greene is a priest worshipping at the altar. Sometimes he dwells on the banal and on more than one occasion misses the obvious, such as Edith’s financial ineptitude being almost identical to that of her mother, the latter’s wanton attitude to money eventually leading to a three-month prison sentence in 1915. And as a stylist he is certainly not comparable to Sitwell, a biographer who, even when she relied on secondary sources, always knew how to bring her subject to life with a well-turned phrase. Would that some of those had been found in this book.
Robert O'Byrne's most recent book is Desmond Leslie: The Biography of an Irish Gentleman, 1921-2001(Lilliput Press)
