Selected Letters 1919-1964 by Edith Sitwell (1970)

The most revelatory element of reading these is, as it should be, the portrait of the writer which slips through the wit and the commonplaces. Sitwell was touchy, super-sensitive, and a brazener-out of conflicts. She had typical evasions and moments of ego which were skilfully combined to become a 'blind' to any attacker, or to any whom it was worth her while to dismiss. All of this is, of course, very familiar from two angles - one being that of the well-known Edith Sitwell showing the colours we expect, the other being the point of view of the reader's own personality. It's impossible to ignore one's own propensities of this ilk, reading between these lines! These agonies are all of ours. Agonies aside, though, these letters are highly entertaining. The occasional repetition of exclamations of gratitude for services rendered by various correspondents doesn't deeply mar the experience. They of course evoke a world, actually not that long ago, where an Edith Sitwell could exist - as could a Margaret Rutherford or an Irene Handl. This is a fulsome part of the pleasure of this volume, as is the back story to notable developments - the first publication of Wilfred Owen's poems, the advent of Dylan Thomas, the outrageous baiting of Wyndham Lewis and FR Leavis - rich colours.

Commonplace Book

'By the way, I did not praise Mrs Meynell. Please erase that. She is hopelessly bad. And I do not remember praising Dowson. He is limp and lifeless.
[...]
...Virginia Woolf, I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter'.
[...]
...Vachel Lindsay is, technically, a simply horrible poet, and the Congo poem is the worst of the lot. (I like The Golden Whales of California, but his technique is always ghastly. He has had no influence on me whatever.)'

from a letter to Geoffrey Singleton, 11 July 1955 in Selected Letters 1919-1964 by Edith Sitwell

Commonplace Book

'...I wonder if you met that appalling woman Hedda Hopper? I had trouble with her, so I've told everybody that I heard on the best authority that the very bad outbreak of rabies in Hollywood was due to the fact that Miss Hopper had pursued the dogs and succeeded in biting them. I added that personally I didn't believe a word of it - for, after all, they run very fast!'

from a letter to John Gielgud, 12 May 1953 in Selected Letters 1919-1964 by Edith Sitwell

Commonplace Book

'...She then said "Are you ill? You are so pale." I said "I always go as white as a sheet when I am bored" (which is true). She then went away.'

from a letter to John Lehmann, 15 June 1948 in Selected Letters 1919-1964 by Edith Sitwell

Commonplace Book

'...I have been having a lot of trouble with silly little Bloomsburys lately. They all think that it matters to me if they, and people like Desmond MacCarthy, like my poetry. It doesn't. I don't expect them to. They've civilised all their instincts away. They don't any longer know the difference between one object and another, - or one emotion and another. They've civilised their senses away, too. People who are purely 'intellectual' are an awful pest to artists. Gertrude Stein was telling me about Picasso, when he was a boy, nearly screaming with rage when the French version of the Bloomsburys were 'superior' to him. "Yes, yes," he said, "your taste and intellect is so wonderful. But who does the work? Stupid, tasteless people like me!"

How irritating it is, though. In the 1890s, 'superior' people discovered that ugliness is beauty. But the modern intellectual is a bigger fool than that. He has discovered that everything is ugly, - including beauty.'

from a letter to Allanah Harper, c1928 in Selected Letters 1919-1964 by Edith Sitwell

Commonplace Book

'...I met an appalling woman called Madeleine Caron Rock, extremely fat and exuding a glutinous hysteria from every pore. I sat beside her on the sofa, and became (much against both our wills) embedded in her exuberance like a very sharp battle-axe.

Whenever anyone mentioned living, dying, eating, sleeping, or any other of the occurences which beset us, Miss Rock would allow a gelatinous cube-like tear, still warm from her humanity, to fall upon my person, and would leave the room in a marked manner. A moment afterwards, the flat would be shaken by a canine species of howling, and after an interval, Miss Rock would return and beg all our pardon with great insistency....'

from a letter to Robert Nichols, March 1919 in Selected Letters 1919-1964 by Edith Sitwell