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Through her teens Edith memorized vast stretches of poetry, until she was able to recite poem after poem all the way from England to the Sitwell villa near Florence without repeating herself once. When she discovered the heavy-breathing love poems of Algernon Swinburne, her family's friends were shocked. Her answer was to make the rough crossing to the Isle of Wight, where Swinburne is buried. There, over the furious objections of the sexton, she poured a jug of milk over the grave and placed on it a honeycomb, a wreath of bay leaves and a sheaf of roses.
Buns & Barrel Organs. With her beloved governess, Helen Rootham Edith went to Berlin to study music. Not until she was 27 did she get away from home for good. Says she: "I became a human being when I was 27." In her London flat, Edith Sitwell gave Saturday teas at which she served halfpenny buns, evening parties with coffee and iced cherries. The talk was rich and gay, the guests were talented: T. S. Eliot, Jacob Epstein, E. M. Forster, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf.
Edith worked hard. "I used to practice writing poetry as a pianist practices," she recalls. "I would take a waltz or a polka, some gay music-hall song or perhaps the song of the barrel organ beneath my window and translate it into words."
When Edith first read the spanking rhythms of Facade publicly through a horn and hidden from the audience by a curtain, she was hissed, and one paper wrote: "Surely it is time this sort of thing were stopped." Brother Osbert remembers that even friends avoided the Sitwell eyes; Edith and Osbert were made to feel "as if we had committed a murder."
Dame Edith insists that the early poems were apprenticeship: "I wasn't such a fool as to use any fire that I had until I had the vehicle for the fire." In 1929 the vehicle left on its maiden journey in the poem Gold Coast Customs. Skillful, almost savage, it describes African murder rites and equates them with the miseries of London slums and the lives of the fashionable rich. William Butler Yeats wrote: "Something absent from all literature was back again . . . passion ennobled by intensity, by endurance, by wisdom . . ."
But no sooner had Poet Sitwell arrived than she came to a dead stop. For ten full years she wrote almost no poetry, spent most of her time nursing Helen Rootham through her final illness. Her friend died in 1939, and the war ended Edith's silence, because she was "in such a passion of despair and rage and pity." Her wartime poetry stands up today as enormously inventive and touched with a compassion that astonished her early admirers. Through the war and since, she has moved majestically toward God and the brotherhood of man, never doubting the presence of one and the possibility of the other:
The Sun kisses the loveless.
The mouth of the condemned by Man, the dog-mouth and the lion-fang
Deep in the heart . . . Then why should we lie loveless?
He will clothe us again in gold and a little love.