BOOKS

There are some people who seem to be using the creative arts for such peculiar ends of their own — to sort the world out, to cure themselves of their problems - and with such patchy results for their audiences that, really, it would have been kinder to have stopped them doing it in the first place. Perfectly nice people, of course, but lacking in a sense of interest, a sense of understanding of their materials, which limits their appeal to anyone else. As Randall Jarrell once wrote, `It was a black day When Quakers first made jewellery.' It seems odd at first to talk about Edith Sitwell as such a writer, since one of her constantly declared obsessions was with the technique of poetry, one of her most Profoundly held convictions was that she Was the most technically skilled of poets. Eyebrows have long been raised by her Some Notes on my own Poetry' which stands as a preface to the Collected Poems. Sitwell was happy to declare her own poetry `virtuoso exercises in technique of an extreme difficulty'. When it comes to the poetry itself, however, no one since Sitwell has ever been able to perceive the subtleties she saw in it. When William P. lomer came to lunch in 1949, Edith wrote it up for the benefit of her brother Osbert. I said, "I have never asked anyone to defend my poetry." He replied, "Well, you couldn't very well, could you?" ' This is what she has to say about one of the Façade poems, `The Wind's Bastinado'.

The change from the word `melon' to Mammon' (the latter word is like thick dust that has gathered itself into some embodiment), the change from the dreami- ness of 'Babylon', which is in part a matter of association to the sharp sound, like that of a hard coin falling on dry ground, of patacoon' — this is deliberate.

Excellent analysis, no doubt, but unfortu- nately Sitwell ruins her case by quoting the passage she's talking about:

Came the great Soldan In his sedan

Floating his fan Saw what the sly Shadow's cocoon In the barracoon 'Held. Out they fly. This melon,

Sir Mammon, Comes out of Babylon: Buy for a patacoon - Sir, you must buy!'

The trouble is that nobody will ever believe that this sort of thing is remotely difficult to do. If you are prepared to make Your poetry mean absolutely anything at all, or nothing, then of course it isn't hard

The lady doth protest too much

Philip Hensher

SELECTED LETTERS OF EDITH SITWELL edited by Richard Greene Virago, 120, pp. 484 to mess about with internal rhymes until the cows come home. Something Sitwell never quite got over was the ease with which these poems, over which she had so laboured, could be imitated by others, like Noel Coward in the poems of his splendid creation Hernia Whittlebot.

The letters are full of direct or indirect assertions of the value of her poetry — `As the author of Gold Coast Customs . . ' she is apt to begin, reminding her readers of something they had probably forgotten or never knew. It is this sort of thing, rather than the poems' high public profile during the 1920s, which makes one agree with F. R. Leavis when he says that the Sitwells belong to the history of publicity rather than the history of poetry. Her correspon- dents are constantly being told how hard she works, how strenuous the creation of a few lines of poetry is, and, though she rarely descends to praising her own work directly, she can hardly hold herself back when it comes to the work of her brothers. To Sacheverell about his All Summer in a Day, she says:

The passage about Pyramus and Thisbe will, in the future, be regarded as one of the greatest passages in English literature . . . the whole book in its entirety is to me like some wonderful and unspeakably moving music.

There's more than family loyalty going on here; it's what she would like to say about her own work.

In many ways, what emerges from the letters and her biography is a sad story; the story of someone so badly hurt that she would use her work for the only purpose that mattered, to shield herself. Early in the correspondence there are plenty of passages which seem not to be describing, not saying anything true or felt, but simply phrase-making, for the sheer pleasure of saying something which couldn't be questioned. Osbert Sitwell was defeated as a parliamentary candidate for Scarborough in 1919, so

The horror of Scarborough has, however, acted like electricity upon me. What a strange place — partly a clownish bright- coloured tragic hell, partly a flatness where streets crawl sluggishly, and one drop of rain (no more) drops on one's face half way down the street, and there are no inhabitants, or so it seems, but boys so indistinguishable in their worm-white faces that they have to wear coloured caps with initials that one may be known from another.

This sort of thing is all façade — I've been to Scarborough, and I must say I don't remember the `worm-white faces' — but if we ask what lay behind the façade we must conclude that her various barricades were so strongly constructed that we can only guess at it.

A clue might lie in the obsessive way she dwells on what she calls 'impertinences' and Insults% Sometimes these are literary impertinences, or, as the rest of us would say, getting it a bit wrong — an announcer on the BBC saying that a poem of hers is `strongly marked by caustic wit and satirical play on words'. More often, however, it is concerned with sex. Sitwell pretty clearly absolutely loathed the idea of sex, and was always ready to censure it in others. A critic speculating about the role of sexual unrest in her work got the same breathless- ly furious response as a publisher who wanted to put her photograph on the front of a book entitled The Brighter Side of Birth Control. When writing about authors who were sexually frank, or, indeed, merely emotionally frank, she could never see the point. 'Don't either of you young men know anybody who is capable of getting into his own bed and stopping there?' she wrote to a couple of literary hopefuls who had sent her a novel. As for Lady Chatterley's Lover, it was, she wrote bizarrely, a signal to persons who wish to unload the filth in their minds on the British public ... I can scarcely be accused of shirking reality, but I do not wish to spend the rest of my life with my nose nailed to other people's lavatories. I prefer Chanel Number 5.

She wasn't a good letter-writer, and this is rather an enervating collection, harping on the same few themes. It might have been more interesting, though, if Richard Greene had been fuller with his notes and explanations. Many of the most curious episodes in Sitwell's life are sketched over; the reader seeking an explanation of quite why Sitwell's loathed father, 'Ginger', left all his money to a Swiss banker called Woog is casually referred to another biog- raphy. The collection is further damaged by something not Greene's fault, the lack of most of the letters to Sitwell's great obses- sion, the painter Pavel Chelichev. The few that have slipped through the net — most of them are locked up at Yale — are far more revealing than the rest of the volume, and, in bulk, would certainly change one's picture of Sitwell.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that something very horrible happened to Edith Sitwell. Perhaps it was a childhood spent in the shadow of a beautiful, wicked mother who constantly reproached her with her ugliness; perhaps it was worse even than that. Whatever it was, I suspect she wrote, not to reveal, but to conceal it; her success in putting up a façade of meaningless poet- ry, of abstract play in front of something that really mattered, was a success in her own terms, not in her readers'. It was as if she were crippled from the start, and would cripple her own work in turn.