Books
Façade and reality
Francis King
Edith Sitwell: Fire of the Mind An Anthology by Elizabeth Salter and Allanah Harper (Michael Joseph £7.95) Joyce Cary: Selected Essays Edited by A. G. Bishop (Michael Joseph £4.50) s Auden's remark about private faces in public places being nicer than public faces in private places came back to me when I set about comparing these two anthologies and the lives of their authors. Rather like a Knole or Petworth, once inviolable in its privacy but eventually thrown open, for reasons of financial stringency, to everincreasing hordes of tourists, Edith Sitwell went determinedly public for the last forty or so years of her life. Joyce Cary, on the other hand, kept a high wall between himself and any inquisitive visitor. Yet, whereas Edith Sitwell often struck strangers as remote and even chilly, Cary was one of the most relaxed and clubbable of men.
'Thus Dame Edith takes up her position with Whitman and Dylan Thomas and the mystics, with Blake and Rimbaud' (Cyril Connolly). 'This was not merely exquisite poetry : it was great poetry' (Kenneth Clark). 'The most unique musician in the literature of our time' (Pamela Hansford Johnson). Such reviews read like obituaries; and like obituaries, they now seem, eleven years after Edith Sitwell's death, to opt for generosity rather than truth when the two are in conflict.
Yet, even during her lifetime, there were critics like Leavis, Grigson and Wyndham Lewis who were unconvinced of Edith Sitwell's 'most-uniqueness'; and for them she always had some retort (to 'sharpen her claws' against their 'wooden heads' was how she described it), the blithe cheek of which was more likely to win over the general public than her detractors. 'The Doctor [Leavis] has a transcendental gift, when he is writing sense, for making it appear to be nonsense . . The yah-boo is an amusing one: but it hardly carries the same deadly sting, since it does not have the same germ of truth, as Dr Leavis's verdict that 'Edith Sitwell belonged to the history of publicity'.
The early poems in Fire of the Mindover-ripe fruits left over from Goblin Market—have the fanciful, decorative charm of Rackham or Dulac illustrations. Facade has far more muscle: so that, though we may not take too seriously the author's claim that the poems in it are 'in many cases virtuoso exercises in technique of extreme difficulty',. it does represent a spirited extension of what Vachel Lindsay had already done in such verse as The Daniel Jazz. Gold Coast Customs followed: savage and desperate (this was a period of acute unhappiness for her), it is almost a great poem. Then, isolated by the war in which she did not take any part, she at last produced work of indisputably durable value: Street Songs in 1942 and Green Song in 1944.
In the later poems each line seems to be thrown out like some long, untidy lasso that usually just fails to noose the precise meaning at which it is aimed. An actress born to play Peter Pan is now determined to rant her way through the part of Cassandra. In her introduction Elizabeth Salter writes of 'images, repeated symphonically through her poetry'. That is one way to view what to others May seem a stultifying poverty of thematic material as she advanced into old age.
In addition to the poetry, the editors have included extensive quotations from the prose—'another facet of her genius'. But much of this, written for such papers as the Sunday Referee and the Evening News in order to make money while she was gallantly nursing and supporting her dying former governess, hardly merits exhumation. 'A cat has just as much right to his love affairs as you have to yours. And it is your duty to get out of your beds in the middle of the night to inquire if the cat wants anything.' Many a paragraph is as whimsical and trivial as that.
What perpetually emerges from these skilfully edited pages is a Great Character, part Violet Bonham Carter and part Nellie Wallace, of the kind that the British public has always taken to its heart: generous, tetchy, touchy, funny, mettlesome. A great writer emerges less often.
A great writer also emerges only intermittently from Joyce Cary's Selected Essays. I suspect that this is because, for all his intelligence, Cary was essentially an intuitive novelist, who put forth his best work as prodigally and with as little forethought as a tree puts forth its leaves. I remember how, in 1956, he came out to Greece on a lecturetour for the British Council, for which I was then working. When he had a couple of small falls, it was thought that these were the after-effects of a minor crash at London Airport of the Viscount in which he had been travelling out; but in fact they were the first indications of the insidious paralysis against which he battled with so much courage up to the moment of his death. There are a number of excellent novelists—Iris Murdoch, Margaret Drabble and Angus Wilson at once come to mind—who have also proved themselves excellent British Council lecturers. But Cary was not one of these. When he was questioned about the work of his contemporaries, he was often vague and
hesitant; when he was questioned about his own work, he was often inhibited by modesty and shyness. He was, in short, a far more effective cultural ambassador at a cocktail party or a dinner-party than on a lecture platform.
These essays reinforce that verdict. Of the autobiographical writing, 'A Great Author Faces up to Death', an interview given to Graham Fisher, is intensely moving in its simplicity and directness; but an earlier interview, given to John Burrow and Alex Hamilton, though full of interesting things, has about it the elaborate self-consciousness of someone embarrassed at having to talk at length about himself. Tolstoy was the writer whom Cary admired above all others—both were novelists who, despite or because of their intense maleness, had an extraordinary intuitive understanding of women —and the essay on Tolstoy's Theory of Art is outstanding. But, like many of the Sitwell essays, such pieces as 'The Most Exciting Sport in the World' (polo) or 'The Meaning of England' are journalistic trivia of the kind easily produced by a fluent writer and easily (and best) forgotten.
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