The Pythoness

Edith Sitwell, born in 1887, died near the end of 1964. In the November issue of the London Magazine of that year, Mr Julian Symons wrote:

Edith Sitwell’s rhetoric is the product merely of words ringing like bells in her head. Those who thought otherwise for a few years were deceived by the experience of war . . . . At no other time than during the war could poems which reverted in their language to Victorian archaism and rhetoric, poems so lacking in coherent thought and so determined to ignore the world of objects in which we live, have deceived so many intelligent critics . . .

I quote Mr Symons because he is the sort of critic – and there are many of them – who are fundamentally repelled and irritated by Edith Sitwell’s poetry. In a long debunking article, he argues that her verse is out of touch with reality – that no intelligent critics have been taken in for long by it – that her works of criticism are mainly nonsense – that she has desired above all to be fashionable – that she indulges, in her later poems, in ‘a rash of capital letters’ – that in her verse ‘there are few memorable and exact images, there is nothing but an endless Swinburnian flow of would-be evocative words’.

Mr Symons’s main argument boils down to this – that Edith Sitwell took the content of her poems almost entirely from literary sources, not from any experience of life. I think he is mistaken; and I think I can prove it. That will be my own modest way of paying a tribute to a great modern poet who has just died.

Mr Symons is not a woman; nor am I. But I have suspected that the experiences of men and women are in certain ways different; and so the symbols they use are different. There are no male Emily Brontës, no male Colettes, for example. To understand the writing of Emily Brontë or Colette – or, I suggest, Edith Sitwell – a man has to make an imaginative leap – he has to see the world from a woman’s point of view. Otherwise he will think: ‘Why the hell can’t this writer express the feelings I would have, only better; think the thoughts I would think, only better? Why does she persist in seeing blue where I see green?’ I think Mr Symons has made this mistake. Edith Sitwell is a remarkably female poet, and not perhaps in a way that Mr Symons is used to. I am quite willing to grant a number of Mr Symons’s minor contentions:

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That Edith Sitwell was limited by an upper-class environment.

Yes; but she dug deep, which is usually a woman’s way of coping with limits.

That Edith Sitwell wrote a lot of silly criticism.

Yes; but the silliness usually took the form of hero-worship for dead writers, an amiable enough vice. And it did not affect her poems.

That Edith Sitwell was personally flamboyant and eccentric.

Yes; I think it was again a woman’s way of coping with limits; perhaps an old-fashioned way. She was a Victorian in her childhood. Eccentricity is one alternative to rebellion, I think – and it does show in her poetry – that she had a great sympathy with the weak, the sad, the cramped, the people irretrievably deformed by their conditions of life, and a horror of hurting them. Perhaps she felt that way about her own equally eccentric family. The brusque normality of modern life is often only a shell, anyway.

That Edith Sitwell’s theories about assonance and alliteration were often rather far-fetched.

Yes; but I think she concentrated on theories of form as a counter-balance to the massive, private, and highly-charged experience of life that lay behind the poems.

Speaking of fashion – as Mr Symons does – it is not the fashion at the present time to admire broad, massive structures in poetry. Lord Byron would hardly get a look-in with the modern critics, American or English. William Blake would be a dead duck. The reason for this lies chiefly in the dry, anti- emotional quality of intellectual life in the age of the computer and the atom bomb. Some writers can fit in with it; but some just can’t. Dylan Thomas fought it successfully, establishing his own norms; and Edith Sitwell did the same. Because they had to, or else not write at all.

At this point, I think we can forget the unfortunate Mr Symons. He had the bad luck to get his lively, destructive, controversial, abusive, debunking article published just about the time when Edith Sitwell died. Death takes the fun out of things. It also puts a seal on the work of any writer. Often a pattern emerges from the work which was not so clearly apparent during the writer’s lifetime.

Roughly four stages, or phases of development, can be distinguished in Edith Sitwell’s poetry:

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A stage of innocence, during which the poet experimented with rhythms, and wrote lively, obscure poems based on childhood and adolescent experience; a stage of pain, darkness and crisis, when she wrote several passionate love poems, and expressed a new knowledge of human evil; a brief period – related to the one I have just mentioned – when she wrote war poems with a strong religious emphasis; a final stage of gradual reconciliation to old age and the inevitability of death.

This is not a biographical talk. I do not know much about Edith Sitwell’s life; nor do I want to know much about the trivialities that are often called a life – who her acquaintances were; whether she was a meat-eater or a vegetarian; what she said when she lost her temper. The significant events are already explicit or implicit in her poetry.

The early poems have been widely anthologised – perhaps because they have a high surface polish and remind one, at first, of sophisticated nursery rhymes. In his Introduction to the Faber Book of Modern Verse Michael Roberts spoke of ‘the relaxation-poems . . . those in which words associate themselves mainly according to relations and similarities of sound, as in Miss Sitwell’s “Hornpipe” . . .’.

But is this true? Perhaps the critics and editors have been lazy.

The poem ‘Hornpipe’ begins with dancing sailors, as if in a Benjamin Britten ballet. The white horses of the sea are specifically the rocking-horses of early childhood. The sky like a huge, dumb rhinoceros watches Lady Venus rise out of the ocean. She resembles an opulent musical comedy actress, a Victorian ‘shady lady’, sitting or lying on a horsehair sofa. Meanwhile Lord Tennyson writes his poems, and Queen Victoria comes riding on an iceberg whose colours resemble those of the Albert Memorial.

They both see an Emperor from Zanzibar laying the kingdoms of the world at the feet of Madam Venus. Two characters – one military (Captain Francasse) and one a baronet (Sir Bacchus) – are drinking brandy together (‘the black tarred grapes’ blood’) – and the grapes were plucked from tartan leaves by a wind whose grief age could not wither – the grief, I take it, of Queen Victoria at the death of the Prince Consort.

Queen Victoria, riding on the rocking-horse of a wave, remarks to Lord Tennyson that Madam Venus is very far from being her cup of tea; in fact the whole situation is out of hand –

‘For the minx,’ said she,
‘And the drinks, you can see,
Are hot as any hottentot and not the goods for me . . . !’

This is hardly the geometry of Euclid; but neither is it nonsense. It is most distinctly a poem about the Victorian age. Not just memories of childhood – but the shrewd, unsentimental child’s vision itself, in which there is nopage 696 distinction between mythological characters – the Greek god of wine becomes a baronet – pictures on the nursery wall, the grotesque adults understood far better than they would ever imagine. Alcohol is taboo (the brandy-drinking gentlemen in the smoking-room) and sex also (the shady lady with the fire of hell in her veins) while the status quo is somewhat negative, fusty and frozen. The same kind of experience gives life to a companion poem –

When Sir Beelzebub called for his syllabub
In the hotel in Hell
Where Proserpine first fell . . .

The Devil is again a hard-drinking baronet; and the hotel is located in Hell, where a Victorian temperance worker might expect to find it. But Hell is also the Greek Hades where Proserpine fell from the light of the sun – that is, where she became a fallen woman. Alfred Lord Tennyson appears in this poem also, persecuted by a deputation of temperance workers; and finally –

Like Balaclava the lava came down from the
Roof, and the sea’s blue wooden gendarmerie
Took them in charge while Beelzebub roared for his rum . . .

The waves of the sea resemble the wooden soldiers of the nursery. The world is a hot, explosive place, where the forces of instinct and the forces of morality and custom clash head-on.

The strong irrational fears of childhood are present in several of the early poems –

I thought I saw the wicked old witch in
The richest gallipot in the kitchen!
A lolloping galloping candle confesses.
Outside in the passage are wildernesses
Of darkness rustling like witches’ dresses . . .

Some critics have objected to the artificiality of the early poems – (for example) ‘what is noticeable . . . is that they almost exclude reference to the world of natural objects . . .’. But surely this is inevitable, if – as I suggest – the poems are based on childhood experience. One has to see in the mind’s eye, a young female child growing up in a large country house, first in Victorian, then in Edwardian England. She contemplates the objects of the nursery or the strawberries in the kitchen garden at the back of the house – she senses the eccentricity of her baronet father – she loves and sympathises with the old gardener and the tired timid housemaid – she resents the French governess whose job it is to turn her into a lady –

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. . . Among the coarse goat-locks of snow
Mamzelle still drags me, to and fro;
Her feet make marks like centaur hoofs
In hairy snow; her cold reproofs
Die, and her strange eyes look oblique . . .

The child is very much aware of the ambiguity of adult life. If she herself were not present, she feels that the Frenchwoman would turn back to somebody milking goats – or possibly into an actual nanny-goat. This child – thank God – is never wholly absent from Edith Sitwell’s understanding of life. She keeps the odd-woman-out position of a child eavesdropping from the landing on the incomprehensible adult conversations – sympathetic to waifs and no-hopers – afraid of death and the dark, yet believing that somehow the Garden of Eden can be found – a painful, solitary position, which nevertheless contains an inextinguishable spark of innocence and a lifelong passion to create and harmonise and reconcile.

One obstacle to understanding the poetry of the second stage is the open secret of Edith Sitwell’s life – a secret that her critics have lacked either the brains or the sympathy to penetrate – the fact that her love poems are written to other women –

The King of China’s daughter,
She never could love me
Though I hung my cap and bells upon
Her nutmeg tree . . .

The poet sees herself as a masculine fool or jester unsuccessfully courting a princess. Sometimes, though, the love is mutual and reciprocated –

Come then, my pomp and splendour of the shade.
Most lovely cloud that the hot sun made black
As dark-leaved airs. –
Come then, O precious cloud,
Lean to my heart.

But Eros is a dangerous god; and the dangers of homosexual love – I use the term with the utmost respect – are particularly great, because of that sealed-off, terrible underworld which waits for anyone who falls from the tightrope of fidelity. From the interior evidence of the poem ‘Gold Coast Customs’ I conclude that the woman to whom the poet was most deeply attached left her and chose instead a wealthy, corrupt, Lesbian socialite as a partner –

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From the cannibal mart
That smart plague-cart
Lady Bamburgher rolls where the foul news-sheet
And the shambles for souls are set in the street . . .

The beloved has crossed the hairline that divides the anchored from the lost in homosexual society –

For this painted Plague-cart’s
Heart, for this
Slime of the Worm that paints her kiss . . .
The half of my heart that lay in your breast
Has fallen away
To rot and bray
With the painted mud through the eyeless day . . .

By this defection she has destroyed the poet’s paradise of difficult innocence –

How far is our innocent paradise,
The blue-striped sand,
Bull-bellowing band
Of waves, and the great gold suns . . .

The torment comes partly from the fact that the innocent love can no longer be separated from a run-of-the-mill liaison inside the Lesbian socialite menagerie. There is some danger of the loss of reason –

From Bedlam’s madness the thick gadflies
Seek for the broken statues’ eyes . . .

At least the poet could lose her inner sight, which depends on retaining a centre of innocence. But what happens is different. ‘Gold Coast Customs’ is Edith Sitwell’s version of Dante’s Inferno. The customs of modern London are identified with the markets of the Gold Coast in the early nineteenth century, when human flesh was sold openly for cannibal consumption. The hideous fashionable parties go on cheek-to-jowl with the life of the outcasts of the city – sailors, beggars, prostitutes and the neglected old. In part, the poem is a savage satire on the callousness of the rich; but it digs deeper, into the horror of spiritual death which underlies the world of rich and poor alike. I regard it as a key poem for the understanding of Edith Sitwell’s work. Most of the images of the later poems can be found – at least embryonically – somewhere in its magnificent, ferocious, compassionate, sprawling length. It embodies a creative response to the problem of human evil.

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The experience of what seems betrayal in love – the sense of some almost fatal wound inflicted – the sense, above all, that Love, or God, or one’s own soul, are dying – this experience is all but universal for the human race. And a writer can hardly write for the multitude unless he or she has been burnt by it. The particular happening – a lost lover, a death, some fault of one’s own – hardly matters. The point is – at least for a writer’s purpose – that he or she recognises inwardly what a child recognises only outwardly – the mystery that theologians have called the Fall of Man. The experience presents a hurdle. Either the writer stops writing; or else writes as if the Fall had not occurred – dead work, sentimental work – or else begins to write truthful poems about the Fall. Edith Sitwell, to her credit, accepted the hardest alternative. And this meant that from then on she stood outside the pattern of bourgeois society – because in bourgeois society only other people are fallen – never oneself, or one’s friends and neighbours.

The poems of Edith Sitwell’s third phase – the war poems – are an offshoot of a basically Christian approach to the problem of human evil –

Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, hangs there, have mercy on us –
On Dives and on Lazarus:
Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one . . .

The Rain is the flood of bombs that descended on London in 1940. The poet does not dodge the essential problem – she does not even mention the war in nationalist terms – because the offence is by humanity against humanity. She does make the comment that the Rich and the Poor, at the point of death are no longer divided. Christ Himself is seen as one of the Poor – the Starved Man, who is at the receiving end of all historical brutality. Edith Sitwell was peculiarly sensitive to the hidden crime of callousness by the Haves of the modern world towards the Have-Nots – perhaps because she grew up in a well-to-do family. Her answer is not political but religious – a regeneration of the spirit of charity among men.

In the second of ‘Three Poems of the Atomic Age’, she sees the atomic explosion at Hiroshima revealing as if in a huge gash in the earth ‘the body of our brother Lazarus’ – observing correctly that (outside political or national categories) that atrocity was a massacre of the Have-Nots by the Haves. The poem is one of accusation –

. . . when the last Judas-kiss
Has died upon the cheek of the Starved Man Christ, those ashes that were
men
Will rise again
page 700 To be our Fires upon the Judgment Day . . .

I do not feel that her religious poetry is wholly successful. She abandons the early experiments with verse-form and relies on the force of an enormous sincerity. Yet perhaps her partial successes in this field are more significant that the dry, accurate trivialities of many of her contemporaries. At least she has tackled at depth the problems of the modern world. I cannot see how any critic could claim that her later work is over-literary.

The fourth and final stage is the one which I have chosen to give a title to this talk – the time of the Pythoness. An old woman has the right to give her thoughts to others – a speaking part of the earth itself – like the priestess of the Delphic oracle – from outside the cycle of generation. In these last poems Edith Sitwell acknowledges fellowship with all living creatures. Thus, in her sequence, ‘The Bee Oracles’ –

The golden thunders of the Lion and the Honey-Bee
In the Spirit, held with the Sun a Colloquy

Where an old woman stood – thick Earthiness –
Half Sun, Half Clod,
A plant alive from the root, still blind with earth
And all the weight of Death and Birth.

She in her primitive dress of clay, bent to her hives
And heard her sisters of the barren lives
Begin to stir . . .

To sing the great hymn of Being to the Lost:

This Earth is the honey of all Beings, and all Beings
Are the honey of this Earth . . . O bright immortal Lover
That is incarnate in the body’s earth –
O bright immortal Lover Who is All! . . .

This was the song that came from the small span
Of thin gold bodies shaped by the holy Dark . . .

And in the plain of dust like a great Sea
The Lion in the Spirit cried, ‘Destroy – destroy
The old and wrinkled Darkness.’ But the Sun
That great gold simpleton – laughed like a boy,
And kissed the old woman’s cheek and blessed her clay . . .

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Some critics may think this is outdated nonsense. I think it is the rarest of all things – the triumph song of an old woman, able to accept whatever has happened to her, and whatever is going to happen, including death. And I think it will outlast many generations.

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