Edith Sitwell by Richard Greene

Author:Richard Greene
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781405511070
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2011-11-10T05:00:00+00:00

In the autumn of 1938, Sitwell settled down to work on an anthology for Victor Gollancz, which she hoped to have ready by Christmas. It took until the next summer. She also wrote a radio play about Romeo Coates, one of her English Eccentrics, which was broadcast on 23 February 1939.42 She submitted a dutiful review (Sunday Times, 2 October 1938) of David Horner’s travel book Through French Windows, attributing to it ‘charm and wit and perception’ and ‘admirable writing’.43 However, she was tired and ill. Her physician in England was Lord Dawson of Penn (physician-in-ordinary to the King, he is now remembered for the technically treasonous act of hastening the death of George V in 1936 with an injection of morphine and cocaine44). During the summer he told Sitwell that she was exhausted, and he later performed a gynaecological procedure: ‘I became like the Woman in the Bible, and remained like it for a whole month.’45 Then she caught a chill at the end of October visiting Helen’s grave. She arrived at the Sesame on 12 November with Evelyn in tow, and appears to have stayed on in England until after Christmas.

Largely to get away from Evelyn, Sitwell decided to act on a suggestion Tchelitchew had made before his departure. She tried to set up an American lecture tour, in which she expected to be able to read from a script, while the agent thought she should work from memory. She wrote to Rée Gorer: ‘I am having a protracted argument with the agent, Mr. Colston Leigh, on the subject of whether I am, or alternatively am not, a trick cyclist. As far as I can make out, he would like me to bicycle round and round the platform on the tip of my nose, with my feet in the air, intoning at the same time on the effect that texture has on the caesura.’46 Leigh wanted to bring her to the United States, but with war on the horizon, their plans fell through and she would not cross the ocean for another decade.

Around March 1939, Tchelitchew reappeared in Paris for a vernissage, as Sitwell told Gorer: ‘He is looking very thin and ill. He is furious with me for not having written to him for six months, and hints that I have broken his faith in human nature by deserting him when he was ill. He will never be the same again, he says, never. Either to me, or in general. I think he must have forgotten last summer.’ She added, as an afterthought: ‘Pavlik says the doctors tested him to see if he was getting cancer, which upset me horribly.’47 Unable to hold out any longer, she finally wrote to him:

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