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

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

I've read and re-read the poems, but please may I keep them a little longer, for I want to study them still more.--How beautiful the quiet, unfaltering beginning is. The first lines are so moving and lovely.... As for 'To an Eighteenth Century Poet,' it seems to me the only time any poet has ever succeeded in expressing what we do feel about poetry, and what novelists and other people will never understand that we feel. ([December 14, 1926])

Sassoon must have shared his ambitions and uncertainties with Sitwell, who, in the early years of their friendship, was a welcome source of encouragement. On June 6, 1924, he recorded in his diary his "intense resolve to produce something strong and significant, to express the 'big stuff' of which I am capable. And no doubt, I am afraid of failure" (134). Later he wondered "whether I'11 ever write anything on a big scale ..." (217).Writing on March 11, 1927, to thank Sassoon for a copy of his poem, "The Last Judgement," Sitwell assured him, "Whenever you write anything it is always on a big scale." When Sassoon turned to autobiographical prose, Sitwell remained encouraging. The letters of 1928 frequently express her desire to see The Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, and when she wrote on May 27, 1928, to convey her appreciation of his memoir, her letter was full of warm praise:

The beauty and simplicity are so great, and the truth so overwhelming. It is a fitting book for a poet to have written, and for you to have written.... The contrast between this simple country beauty and the despair of the war makes the part about the war even more unbearably poignant.... Nothing I have read about the war, excepting your own poems, has made me realize what war is like to such an extent as this book.

In such letters one senses the warmth and generosity Edith Sitwell so often displayed to her friends, and to those writers and artists in whom she believed. Such letters also help to explain how a friendship between writers with widely differing tastes and temperaments could have lasted into the thirties: Edith offered Sassoon support and encouragement as he moved away from poetry toward prose at a time when friends like Thomas Hardy, Edmund Gosse, and Robert Graves had either died or become estranged from him.

While the letters amply demonstrate that the friendship of Edith Sitwell and Siegfried Sassoon was fostered by many kindnesses on both sides, they were not sufficient to keep their friendship from slowly disintegrating under the combined weight of several antagonisms and incompatibilities. Although they shared important common ground as poets, their aesthetic ideals differed widely. In spite of the stir Sassoon's war poetry caused in traditional and conservative circles, he was by far the more conventional poet. He believed in the Wordsworthian ideal of simplicity and "directness of utterance ... a full and living voice with something urgent to communicate...." He believed that "simplicity and directness are attended by all the virtues which go with good writing" and that when a writer aims at anything else, "pretentiousness and preciosity" will inevitably result ("Aliveness in Literature" 481). Sassoon's appreciation of Sitwell's early fantastical, experimental poetry is thus perhaps surprising, but he genuinely admired her originality as his review of Facade in the Daily Herald makes clear ("Too Fantastic for Fat-Heads"). His conservative literary tastes, however, as well as his dislike of Sitwell's self-promotion and constant public battles, eventually led to a lowering of his estimate of her stature as a poet, and contributed to the cooling of their friendship.