Edith Sitwell as letter writer: Reading the letters to Siegfried Sassoon

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 1995 by Rand, Thomas

During her long career, Edith Sitwell wrote thousands of letters to a huge variety of correspondents, only a small fraction of which have been published.(1) It is surprising that so few of her letters have appeared in print as she was an accomplished letter writer as fully engaged in the London literary world as anyone writing during the twenties and thirties. She knew nearly everyone in literary and artistic circles and her long roster of friends and enemies kept her amply supplied both with correspondents and subjects. Edith Sitwell's half of the correspondence with Siegfried Sassoon, housed in Washington State University's Holland Library, includes 104 letters written between 1921 and 1957, although most belong to the period of 1926 to 1935.(2) The letters, which include five autograph poems, a few of which are unpublished, offer an interesting record of a curious literary friendship between the most prominent female poet of her day and one of the leading poets of World War I, a friendship that has received relatively slight notice from Sitwell's biographers. Many of Sitwell's and Sassoon's friends and enemies figure in the letters, including Cecil Beaton, Noel Coward, Roy Campbell, John Drinkwater, T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves, Wyndham Lewis, F. R. Leavis, Wilfred Owen, Laura Riding, Gertrude Stein, W. J. Turner, and W. B. Yeats, to name just a few. The letters are full of entertaining literary gossip and open a new window on literary life in the London of the twenties and thirties. That many of Sassoon's friends were Sitwell's enemies accounts in part for the tension in several of the letters, and contributed to the sometimes precarious nature of their friendship. In addition to their importance for the new light they shed on Sitwell's friendship with Sassoon, the letters offer a fuller perspective on Edith Sitwell as a writer of letters than is available in the Selected Letters edited by John Lehmann and Derek Parker, in part because they represent a sustained correspondence with the same person, and also because, writing as she was to a fellow poet, she was encourage d to reveal a side of herself less accessible to those with whom she did not share the craft of poetry.

On reading Sitwell's letters to Sassoon, one is struck by the energy she poured into asserting and protecting her identity as poet. As she assured Sassoon, poetry "is our native element. And we can't really be happy outside our native element" (December 5 (?), 1927).(3) Distractions were a source of frequent frustration: "What I'd give to be able to work continuously. My temper is so bad when I can't" ([March 11, 1927]). Responding to Sassoon's gentle suggestion that she might be publishing too much, Sitwell wrote,

My word, if it had been anyone but you who had told me to 'consider and reconsider,' and 'sift' my poems, I should have taken that person on a one way journey! Luckily, it was you.--But the escape has been narrow. May I enquire, if it isn't an indiscreet question, what you think I have been doing during the three years in which I wrote the first and last Elegies,(4) (working at them quite regularly every day)? Do you think I have been tearing them up and playing ducks and drakes with the pieces, or what? Do you suppose I write poems instead of singing in my bath? or what Do you suppose I toss these things off lightly, like yodelling? Or what?

Do suggest one day to come and have tea here next week. (March 22, 1927)

The instant modulation of tone in the final line lends a terrible humor to the rebuke, as well as a hint of self-parody; nonetheless, the letter reminds one of the truth of Victoria Glendinning's observation that "to reject her poetry was to reject Edith, in a more absolute sense than is usually the case with writers" (226).

Her response to Sassoon's advice, however, was rarely so defensive. From the mid-twenties to the early thirties she frequently shared poems in progress and was thankful for the opportunity to discuss her work with a fellow poet. In an undated letter written late in 1931, she wrote, "I cannot tell you how grateful I am to you about your suggestions for my 'Epithalamium.' You are absolutely right, and I have followed all your suggestions excepting that about 'Though the last light perfumes our bones like myrrh,' which I don't se em able to alter. ...Here is the poem as it stands." The letter is typical of the poets' shop-talk she shared with Sassoon and expresses something of the pleasure she felt sharing her work with his usually receptive, expert ear. It was important to Edith Sitwell to find supporters besides her very able brothers, and in Sassoon she found a friend with whom she could share the struggles and victories of her life as a poet. Her pleasure is evident in a letter she wrote November 9, 1926: "It makes me very happy to know that you really do like this poem of mine [one of the Rustic Elegies]. I was so particularly anxious that you should, because I've worked so frightfully hard digging for my poetry,--if you know what I mean,--and at last it seems to me as if, providing I dig hard enough, one of these days I may find something." Sassoon indeed understood the hard work and frustration of being a poet. Two years earlier he had written in his diary, "Heavens! what fortitude one needs, to become a decent writer. One rushes madly through green thickets, enamoured of the bird-notes which last but a few moments; one stumbles, picks oneself up, and emerges into a barren waste ....And at the end, perhaps, one will meet death with half-a-dozen 'immortal' lines scribbled on half-a-sheet of paper" (86). Edith Sitwell's letter of December 14, 1926, commenting on the poems that would become The Heart's Journey, reflects the kinship they felt as fellow poets: