The Sitwells, tell me more

sacheverell wrote a good book about franz liszt

Edith Sitwell's collaboration with composer William Walton, 'Facade', is fabulous. Made and performed in the early 20s, it involved Walton pastiching lots of hornpipes and jigs and folk songs, but with elaborate, colourful arrangements that put it somewhere between what Weill was doing on 'The Threepenny Opera' and what Les Six (Poulenc, Milhaud etc) were doing in France.

'Walton's Facade was composed in part as a response to Schoenberg's 'Pierrot Lunaire'. A setting of 21 poems by Edith Sitwell, they are a delightful mix of British fancy: hornpipes, tarantellas, fox trots, polkas, tangos, sailor tunes, waltzes and folk songs are given free interpretation by an ensemble composed of flute, clarinet, alto saxophone, trumpet, cello and percussion. The reciters speak the experimental poetry of Edith Sitwell with breathless abandon, enchanting the listener with unusual juxtapositions of images. ("Sailors come/to the drum/out of Babylon/Hobby-horses/ foam, the dumb Sky/rhinoceros glum!).'

Sitwell recited surreal poems from behind a curtain, speaking in her firm aristocratic voice through an enormous megaphone. I believe Osbert (or is it Sacheverell?) narrated some numbers too, like the one that begins 'The navy blue ghost of Mr Bellacre, the allegro negro cocktail shaker...'

Noel Coward hated it, but he was a suburban scruff. It actually reminds me, strangely, of the David Bowie of 'Future Legend'. Dame David, Dame Edith, both fantasists, both 'atmospheric', both terribly English, thin and distinguished. And there's something Cocteau-like about it too... Anyway, it is wunderbar.

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John Pearson wrote a hefty biography, Facades: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell (Macmillan hbk 1978, Fontana pbk 1980), which I hugely enjoyed and recommend – though arguably it pays too much attention to their lives and not enough to their writings, and it says too little about Sacheverell, the most amiable and least high- profile of the trio, who was then still alive and writing.

Offspring of the severely eccentric baronet Sir George Sitwell, they were regarded in Britain between the wars as standard-bearers for modernism and showed a remarkable gift for gaining attention; F R Leavis famously said they belonged to the history not of poetry but of publicity.

Osbert (gay, with a Dorian Gray boyfriend) had been a regular army officer at the outbreak of the First World War and wrote some bitter poems about the heartlessness of middle-aged non-combatants. He is best remembered now for his four volume autobiography, Left Hand, Right Hand.

Edith, like Osbert, was constitutionally angry and prone to feuding. A woman of unorthodox looks, she dressed in an outlandish, bejewelled way; Cecil Beaton, stretching it a bit, called her ‘entirely beautiful, a most wonderful aesthetic object’. She tended to be hostile to other female poets but liked to adopt young male ones, notably Dylan Thomas; a friend of mine once saw her (in all her regalia) and Osbert (gouty and ponderous) loading Thomas’s unconscious form into a taxi. She converted to Catholicism and her most enduring poem apart from those in Facade is ‘Still Falls The Rain’, about the Crucifixion but inspired by the Blitz. Her book on English Eccentrics still has its admirers.

Sacheverell made his biggest splash in his twenties with Southern Baroque Art and continued to write about art, architecture and music as well as producing poetry, memoirs and (I believe) experimental fiction. I don't think he was really a man for vendettas, though he backed his siblings in theirs; the only one who married or had issue, he inherited the baronetcy when Osbert died, lived in the country and survived into his nineties. His only work which is still widely known (hope I’m not being unfair here) is the poem ‘The Rio Grande’, which Constant Lambert turned into a choral work.

Yes, Coward was unfair to them, but his 1923 revue sketch ‘The Swiss Family Whittlebot – In a short exposition of Modern Art’ still makes me laugh. And it has been suggested, seriously or otherwise, that with Facade the Sitwells ‘invented rap’, which is, at least, no less plausible than Normski’s claim that Coward did so with ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’.

‘Still Falls The Rain’,

And a little bit more of Roxy Music's deft hand with cultural influence is made clear to me. I thank you. :-)

THEY SOUND MARVY, I HAVE ORDERED A SELECTION OF THEIR BOOKS AND WILL READ THEM.

And it has been suggested, seriously or otherwise, that with Facade the Sitwells ‘invented rap’, which is, at least, no less plausible than Normski’s claim that Coward did so with ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’.

Okay, this will be getting off topic, but I'd make a case for Vachel Lindsay being the first white rapper, with his "General Booth Enters Into Heaven" (1913). Lindsay would tour and read this and other of his poems, accompanied by drums and other instruments.