Taken Care Of Read online

  Edith Sitwell

  Taken Care Of

  An Autobiography

  Contents

  Preface

  BOOK ONE

  1 An Exceedingly Violent Child

  2 In Disgrace for being a Female

  3 The Sound of Poetry

  4 The Boarding-House

  5 The Primulas had meant no Harm

  6 Long Ago, Many Years Ago

  BOOK TWO

  7 The Sound of Marching Footsteps

  8 Ticket-of-Leave Woman

  9 Aldous and Maria Huxley

  10 Dining Out

  11 The Missing Collar

  12 A Man with Red Hair

  13 The Hours I Spent With Thee, Dear Love

  14 The Audience is meant to Laugh

  15 Eccentricity

  16 The Turkish Army put to Flight

  17 I am about to ‘Scrutinize’ [A bouquet of flowers for the critics]

  18 A World of Shadow

  19 Vulgarity as it has been, will be, ever shall be, Amen

  20 Roy Campbell & Dylan Thomas

  21 Butterfly Aspects

  22 Hollywood

  Preface

  This book was written under considerable difficulty. I had not recovered from a very severe and lengthy illness, which began with pneumonia. The infection from this permeated my body, and the bad poisoning of one finger lasted for fifteen months. This was agonizingly painful, and I could only use either hand with great difficulty, as the poison spread gradually. The reminiscences in this book are of the past. I do not refer to any of my dearly-loved living friends. I trust that I have hurt nobody. It is true that, provoked beyond endurance by their insults, I have given Mr. Percy Wyndham Lewis and Mr. D. H. Lawrence some sharp slaps. I have pointed out, also, the depths to which the criticism of poetry has fallen, and the non-nutritive quality of the bun-tough whinings of certain little poetasters—but I have been careful, for instance, not to refer to the late Mr. Edwin Muir (Dr. Leavis’s spiritual twin-sister). I have attacked nobody, unless they first attacked me. During the writing of certain chapters of this book, I realized that the public will believe anything—so long as it is not founded on truth.

  Dame Edith Sitwell died on December 9th, 1964,

  shortly after writing this preface.

  Book One

  Chapter One

  An Exceedingly Violent Child

  Kierkegaard, in his Journals, wrote ‘I am a Janus bifrons: I laugh with one face, I weep with the other.’

  *

  In the following, but in no other way, do I resemble Savonarola, whose speech, though it related only to his home-town and not the universe, was, unknown to me, the forerunner of mine.

  A lady asked me why, on most occasions, I wore black.

  ‘Are you in mourning?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For whom are you in mourning?’

  ‘For the world.’

  *

  ‘You were an exceedingly violent child,’ said my mother, without any animus.

  The summer of the year 1887 had been particularly hot. One afternoon in the first week of September, my grandparents, Lord and Lady Londesborough, or rather, my grandmother (for my grandfather was a gentle creature whose motto seemed to be laissez-faire) seized upon my mother’s bedroom in Wood End, our house in Scarborough, as the field of one of the worst battles that even my grandmother had ever engendered. These two shadows—one tall and extremely dark (I knew a German governess who thought, when she saw him riding in Hyde Park, that he must be the Spanish Ambassador), one, my grandmother, like an effigy of the Plantagenet race, her ancestors—an effigy into which Rage, her Pygmalion, had breathed life—stood with their backs turned towards the window of the huge conservatory, a background of large tropical leaves and plants, from which, at moments, great flowers like birds flew into my mother’s room.

  This floriation had a strong period atmosphere: ‘silken cords, grey gauzes, green velvets, and crystal discs which blacken in the sun like gauze.’*

  My grandmother stormed, bringing about my early arrival into the world by this singularly appalling row. My beautiful eighteen-year-old mother, bored by the storm (there can have been, apart from the wars in which nations were involved, nothing to equal it before, or after, the San Francisco earthquake) lay in bed awaiting my birth. I, on my part, occupied my unborn state with violent kickings and slappings against the walls of my prison, on the chance of my being let out. I did not know in what a world I was to find myself—in what a siècle inhumain.

  ‘I have wondered sometimes,’ my mother said, recalling this occasion, ‘whether this violence was because you were trying to be born, or whether you were wanting to get at your grandmother.’

  A short way from the house, the sea crawled like a lion awaiting its prey, so softly you could not guess of what tremendous roars that seemingly gentle creature was capable across the lion-yellow sands.

  My grandmother’s rage seemed to fill the universe.

  For some time she had been surprised by the immense showers of emeralds, rivalling the splendour of the Niagara Falls, which descended upon her from jewellers at the request of my grandfather.

  It was only on the day to which I refer that she discovered that he was in the habit of visiting ladies whom one might describe as the naiads sheltering behind those showers—nymphs who were occupied otherwise in prancing and squealing on the stage of musical comedies. After each of these visits, my grandfather was seized by remorse—hence the emeralds.

  My grandmother said everything that came into her head. But she kept the emeralds.

  On the 7th September, two days after this battle, my grandfather, who was President of the Scarborough Cricket Festival, gave a huge luncheon party on the cricket ground, in a tent decorated by flowering plants in tubs, and by the black beards, the eyebrows like branches of winter fir-trees, of Dr. W. G. Grace and other cricketers.

  All went well until it became obvious to the assembled company that I was about to make my entry into the world.

  Narrowly escaping producing me on the cricket ground, my mother was rushed to Wood End, where, within the space of an hour or two, I was born.

  I thought, once, that I remembered my birth. Perhaps what I remembered was my first experience of the light. In William James’s Principles of Psychology he wrote ‘The first time we see light, we are it rather than see it. But all our later knowledge is about what this experience gives: the first sensation an infant gets, is for him the universe.’

  That first sensation remains with every dedicated artist in all the arts. It has remained with me. ‘The infant,’ William James continued, ‘encounters an object in which all the categories of the understanding are contained. It has objectivity, causality, in the full sense in which any later object or system of objects have these things.’

  My parents understood nothing of what, from my childhood, was living in my head.

  In an essay on an exhibition of Monsieur Masson’s paintings (translated by Madame Bussy and published in Transition Forty-Nine, Number 5) Monsieur André de Bouchet said ‘while the painter’s art was becoming acuter, … suns gave birth to innumerable other suns … a fierce sun vibrating over cock-fights, a butterfly sun vibrating over the painter’s head, a bread sun behind the baker kneading her dough.’ All this I saw, transmuted from the painter’s vision into the poet’s. In a way, I had a wild beast’s senses, a painter’s eyesight. Artists in all the arts should have the eyes, the nose, of the Lion, the Lion’s acuity of sense, and, with these, what Monsieur André Breton called ‘la construction solaire,’ the sun of man’s reason.

  But tall ghosts cast their shadows over my early, as on my later life—ghosts tall as the wind of silence on the wall.

  I do not wish to be cruel about a poor dead woman. I have forgiven the unhappiness long ago, and now write of it only because otherwise, after my death, much in me will be misunderstood. I now feel only pity for my mother, a poor young creature, married against her will into a kind of slave-bondage to an equally unfortunate and pitiable young man. Neither seems to have had the slightest knowledge of ‘the facts of life’. My mother ran away a few days after the marriage, and returned to her parents. But my grandmother sent her back. Changeling that I am, I was born nine months after that slavery began. No wonder that my mother hated me throughout my childhood and youth, though she became touchingly reconciled to me after disaster befell her—reconciled after a year in which she tried the worst kind of bullying—taking the form, mainly, of making the most horrible accusations against my moral character.

  Then, suddenly, she forgave me for my existence. One night after this (I slept, at Renishaw, in the room next to hers), she called to me: ‘Edith, have you ever been happy?’

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ I answered. ‘Haven’t you?’

  ‘Never bird-happy,’ she replied. ‘Still, I have three very nice children.’ Then, sighing, she went to sleep again.

  My mother was a young woman of great beauty—Italianate in character. She bore a strong resemblance to one of the drawings by Michaelangelo in the Uffizi Gallery—a drawing of a young woman of an extraordinary summer-like beauty, facing an old woman— herself grown old, but bearing still traces of that ‘high midsummer pomp,’ that majestic beauty. At the same time, my mother bore a likeness to this great line describing the Furies:

  ‘The barren daughters of the fruitful night.’

  *

  Nothing was born in her head, which was barren; but my brothers and I were born of her fruitful night.

/>   When young, she was very gay, was very generous, and lavished on others everything that belonged to her. She had a childlike quality.

  In later years, after she had fallen among thieves, her appearance still retained vestiges of that summer beauty, but as though a black veil had been thrown over it. Her hair was still dark as though it had lain under the shadow of a Fury’s wing. She was still lavish, still wildly hospitable.

  When at Montegufoni, she came to life and found gaiety in arranging those enormous luncheon and dinner parties, to which she and my father succeeded, inevitably, in inviting deadly enemies to meet each other. But at Renishaw, deprived of those hours of hectic hospitality, Time was for her but an empty round between the night and night, a repetition of sad nothingness, like the beat that sounded within her dress of dust; for her, the moments dropped like sad and meaningless tears.

  Somehow she must cross the desert of her days, and that was all she knew.

  To her, all greatness was reduced to the smallness, the uselessness, of a grain of sand; those grains, the little things of life, without sense, without sap, were piled above her until she lay buried beneath them.

  ‘I live from day to day,’ she would reply in answer to enquiries as to her mode of life. She might have added, ‘and for the small distractions of the hour.’

  Her rages were the only reality in her life.

  While at Renishaw, she spent, invariably, her mornings in bed— (so do I, but those mornings of mine are fully occupied)—and this she did because there was nothing to do if she got up. She lay there, also, because her feet, of which she was proud, hurt her, owing to the fact that she insisted on having her shoes made a size too small for her. Lying in bed, therefore, she read the newspapers; but even this was unprofitable to her, for, when the end of the day came, she found that she could not remember one single fact recorded in them, or one phrase; and the same applied to novels, of which she was an omnivorous reader.

  ‘Have I read that?’ she would enquire, when a book was mentioned.

  ‘I don’t care what I am reading,’ she said, ‘as long as I am reading. It passes the time.’

  So she passed the nullity of her days, the blank stretch between hour and hour. She could not know oblivion, for there was always the hollow sound of Time, recalling her, not to herself, for she had no self, only a bundle of small griefs and fears, and mountainous furies—but to the fact that the days were passing, in a darkened and mournful procession towards the grave.

  And on the wall behind her, the shadow of this light and inconsiderable being seemed larger than she, as if it was an effigy of ruin: the movements of that stupendous and sleepless shade had a furious quality, a quality of desperation, as if it prophesied doom.

  In spite of her rages (the result of half-forgotten miseries, of disappointments), there were moments, just before the ambush into which she fell materialized, when she softened towards me—such moments as those when she planned the suppers for the Hospital Ball at Scarborough: ‘Of course, darling, we must have quails!’ Or when, with a far-away, idealistic look in her eyes, she would say ‘of course, what I would really like, would be to get your father put in a lunatic asylum.’

  My father’s appearance, in later life, differed entirely from that which I remember in my earliest childhood. Then, he was good-looking in an insipid way, the insipidity being largely the result of his blinking, with pink eyelids, if he was contradicted, or came near to feeling shame—when he spoke about money, for instance, as on the occasion when I, being extremely poor, had earned £15 (then to me a large sum).

  ‘I hope,’ he said to me, ‘you are saving up for the Little Men’— his grandsons.

  (Poor dear chivalrous creatures, the suggestion would have horrified them!)

  I forget what I answered, but he remained silent, looking indescribably mean, as if he ought to have had a portrait painted of him (wearing two top hats, one on top of the other, and a shabby fur-lined coat), posed against a shop window bearing the device of three gilt balls.

  In later life, he lost these attributes, and became very handsome and noble-looking; with his strange, pale, wild, lonely-looking eyes, and his red beard, he resembled a portrait of one of the Borgias, or some other early Italian tyrant.

  Of course, my father’s principal worry was my mother, who had an objectionable habit of indulging in gaieties. When she died, dear old Henry Moat, my father’s valet, and my brothers’ and my life-long friend, said ‘Well, at least Sir George will know now where Her Ladyship spends her afternoons.’

  My father was extremely active physically, and he had adopted, in later life, the custom of pacing the long passages in Renishaw because, he said, by cultivating such a habit one ceased to trouble if the days were wet and cold, or torrid and weighted by the heat, were drawing out or drawing in. If you paid no attention to a fact, it ceased to exist. He remembered, however, that the weather was useful as a basis for conversation (he would speak with approbation of noisy female nonentities who ‘kept the ball rolling’, by which he meant rattling out unceasing nonsense obliterating the passage of time, at every meal). Apart from these interludes, only the sound of his footsteps, and the care for his health, remained, to bind him to reality. He did not believe in taking risks, however, and, though an agnostic by profession, said his prayers every night, on the chance of this being a good investment.

  When pacing the passages he walked very slowly, occupying as much time as possible, in order that the house should seem even larger than it is—for he liked to think of it as very large. Occasionally (about once or twice a day), he would pause outside a door, if he could hear voices in the room beyond—not because he wanted to eavesdrop or to spy, since there was nothing he could hear that would interest him, but because he was enabled in this way to touch, for a moment, the world in which others moved, thought, acted, without being obliged to become part of it; and this made him real to himself, real in his isolation, in the separation of his identity from the world that he could yet touch at will. For this reason he would pretend to secret information from an unknown source: ‘We happen to know,’ he would say; and when a letter arrived for my mother in a handwriting he did not know, he would enquire ‘How are they?’ He would spread various objects belonging to himself all over the house, in the many rooms—his hat in one room, his stick in another, his spectacle case in a third, because when he came face to face once more, in the course of his wanderings, with these records of his personality, he was reminded of himself, which was pleasant, and because it enabled him to stake his claim on every room in the house as sole inhabitant. Should any other person enter one of the rooms in question, my father would follow him there, and conveying suddenly the impression of very great age, would make it clear by his manner that he had intended to rest there, and had hoped that he would not be disturbed. Then, having by this means routed the intruder and put him to flight, he would continue his walk.

  When he was not pacing up and down the passages, my father spent much of his time in walking up and down outside the house, and when he did this, he would succeed in appearing like a procession of one person—he being the head, the beginning and the end.

  You were conscious of the State Umbrella. On these occasions he would begin by walking rather fast, and briskly, with what seemed to be determination; but it was noticeable that his left foot turned inward towards the right, as if seeking reassurance; and after a while it became apparent that he was going nowhere in particular; he seemed to be walking solely because he wished to feel the earth solid beneath him. He rarely spoke to the members of his family, or to visitors, seeming, indeed, to be separated from them by an endless plain—a stretch of centuries, perhaps, a continent with all its differences of climate, or the enormous space that divides these. Occasionally, however, a gesture or wave of the hand, a smile of great kindliness would be flashed across the plain, from planet to earth. And he had a habit of talking to himself, if not to others, muttering phrases in an unused voice: ‘they may think I shall, but I shan’t!’ Or, with his head a little on one side, he would whisper down to a confidential shoulder: ‘And if they do that, then I shall take the opposite direction.’ And having said this, he would, once in a way, give a queer, rusty, creaking laugh, whose sound was that of a gate that had been shut for so long that it was difficult for it to move upon its hinges, more difficult still for it to open wide. Having laughed, he would take out his watch and look at it shamefacedly, although Time meant nothing to him. So he continued, walking up and down with a sound like the beat of Time in an empty house, a sound like the drip of rain falling from the leaves, echoing through the house. When not pacing up and down, he meditated on various abstruse theories. He took, for instance, a great (but disapproving) interest in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which he professed to understand; and he had numerous theories of his own—mainly dotty—about one thing or another.