There are three writing Sitwells: Edith, Sacheverell and Osbert; and the best of them is Edith. She is a poet (she hates to be called a poetess) and a good one, possibly a great one. Three English universities have dubbed her Doctor, her sovereign has made her a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire, her poetry readings in the U.S. are well attended, and Hollywood has hired her to write the film script for her own book on Queen Elizabeth I. Now published for the first time in the U.S. are her Collected Poems (Vanguard; $6.50). They make an impressive and haunting volume. To Dame Edith, her success is gratifying, especially when she recalls her father's pleasantry on reading her first poems: "Edith will commit suicide when she finds out she cannot write poetry."
Edith Sitwell dresses like a child's vision of a poet. At 67, she still wears the richly brocaded gowns that billow and sweep about her, the quartets of enormous rings, the turbans and the wimples that give her the look of a fictional heroine lately escaped from a 16th century castle. She likes to dwell on the resemblance between her thin, aristocratic features and those of Elizabeth I. Before Edith's portrait in London's Tate Gallery, an American exclaimed: "Lord, she's Gothic, Gothic enough to hang bells in!"
When Dame Edith half sings her short, glittering lines, intones her long, prayer-like ones, many a listener feels the shivers induced by the delivery of the great actresses. Now that Dylan Thomas is gone, hers is the" most startling sight-and-sound presence in English or U.S. poetry.
Edith & the Peacock. Great poets and happy childhoods rarely go together. Edith Sitwell's parents would have preferred a boy. Her father, Sir George, was offended by Edith's aquiline nose and got a doctor to try to change it "by iron and manacles." The attempt failed. Sir George also was cross when his daughter showed a distaste for lawn tennis, made her practice the cello, although she liked the piano. "I used to practice with tears pouring down my cheeks because the ¶string hurt my little finger so frightfully, and also because I was making such a horrible noise."
Even the servants disapproved of the lonely, awkward girl. Once when Edith was reading the Bible at family services, she happened to glance at the butler's solemn face and burst out giggling. "The butler rose and looked around at the maidservants, who all got to their feet and silently trooped out."
Edith was only five when she attempted to run away from home, but returned because she couldn't lace her boots. At Renishaw, the Sitwell country house in Derbyshire, the child's first friend was a peacock which used to wait for her each morning. "I would go to the garden and we would walk, you might say, arm in arm. When asked why I loved him so, I answered, 'Because he's beautiful, and be cause he wears a crown!' " That idyll ended when father Sitwell bought the peacock a wife. "From that moment the peacock neglected me. It was my first insight into the fickleness of living creatures."