Friend to Peacocks

As she was completing her autobiography last April, Dame Edith Sitwell was asked how she felt. "Dying, but apart from that I'm all right," she replied. A little later, she remarked that as a Roman Catholic (she became a convert in 1955), "I know I ought not to dread death, but I am so conceited that I simply cannot imagine how the world would get on without me." In London's St. Thomas Hospital last week, at 77, Edith Sitwell died of a heart attack, thus putting the world to the test.

Pale Glimmer. The world will miss her as a poet, critic, biographer, social lioness, defender of art, warrior against Philistia. But above all, it will miss her as a great English eccentric. She was 6 ft. tall, with a haunted, Gothic face framed by wimples and toques; her long, narrow hands glimmered palely against brocade and velvet gowns. If at times she seemed to have created a lifelong pose for herself, it was a graceful pose of uncommon distinction. "I don't whine," she once said. "That's why everybody thinks I am enormously rich and have a heavenly time."

Sacheverell Sitwell wrote of his sister: "Her love is poetry, she lives within a phrase." Yet she could desert poetry for a decade to nurse her friend and former governess through a long and fatal illness. She admired and championed fellow poets, but seldom the women they married. In her opinion, "the wives of poets should be selected by a committee of other poets." Even worse than poets' wives were critics.

She once wired the Spectator that a certain reviewer should, at her expense, be stuffed and put in a glass case.

Another critic was coldly rebuffed for a belittling reference made 28 years before.

Kings' Blood. Dame Edith was forever conscious that in her veins ran the blood of Robert Bruce and Macbeth, the Kings of France and the Plantagenets of England. Her family had held land near their pinnacled greystone house of Renishaw since 1301. She had a miserable childhood, for her Victorian father disapproved of everything, from her friendship with a peacock to the shape of her nose, which he tried to alter with an iron clamp.

She escaped to London just before World War I, and, with the help of her gifted brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, soon established a salon in her attic apartment. Her verse ranged from the once avant-garde fun of Facade to social comment in Gold Coast Customs and religious visions in her late work. Poetry, she thought, "springs from the essential nature of things." and she sought essential things fn nature, as with her lines:

. . . those bright birds flock;

the butterbump, the urban

Ranee stork, the turkey-cock

(Red paladin in a turban),

The crane who talks through his long

nose,

The plump and foolish quail . . . Badgered Moon. More memorable, perhaps, than her poems were her occasional comments on life and thumbnail descriptions. Condemning the modern age, she remarked: "We have to pay these enormous taxes to send mice up to badger the moon." D. H. Lawrence, she said, "had a rather matted, dark appearance as if he had just returned from spending an uncomfortable night in a very dark cave." On a Hollywood visit, she met and liked Marilyn Monroe, who "wasn't nearly as sexy as men like to imagine. She was a sad, sad. lonely girl. She would have made a wonderful Ophelia."

Indirectly, Dame Edith also contributed a thumbnail sketch of herself in her book, English Eccentrics, in which she attributed her subjects' (and perhaps her own) eccentricity to "that peculiar and satisfactory knowledge of infallibility that is the hallmark and birthright of the British nation."

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