“Sunshades will usurp their space”

This chapter explores the place of clowns in the cultural production of Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell, and how clowns embody and generate “spaces of melancholy.” The psychology that characterizes their work is ultimately a spatial, even allegorical one, in which Pierrots and Harlequins produce nightmarish dreamscapes, theatricalized temporalities, and extended sojourns among ruins—which Pero describes as melancholic camp.In considering camp from a psychoanalytic perspective, Pero argues that spaces like the sublime and the façade work to offer forms of encounter that are governed not by the superego, but by the ego. An ego-driven experience of the sublime makes it possible to transform sublimity, turning its terrifying disinterestedness in the human subject into a form of enjoyment. The “campian sublime” engages the sublime by making it a subject, by treating it as a riddle as “an enigma to be dissolved” rather than solved. The Sitwells’ melancholic camp is both historical and theatrical; the texts consider historical trauma as a form of theatricality and that a fidelity to decaying, neglected forms, such as the clowns of commedia dell’arte, open up what Sacheverell Sitwell, in a Benjaminian move, sees as the possibility of redemption in modernity.

“The Apotheosis of Edith”

This chapter focuses on Cecil Beaton’s famous photographs of Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell. These photographs offer a summary of the ideological motivations for the Sitwells’ artistic activism in the 1920s, a visual representation of their most fervent beliefs about the role of art in British culture. The chapter acknowledges that they were motivated by the desire for publicity and that their many public battles had less to do with deeply felt principles than with opportunism and an eagerness to turn real or imagined slights into highly publicized feuds; however, it argues that Beaton’s 1927 photographs of the Sitwells are also evidence of their investment in a thoughtful reappraisal of British culture after the Great War and in a vigorous revision of the role of the aristocracy within that culture.

The Sitwells and Sitwellism

Few figures have been so renowned and yet so critically dismissed within the history of literary modernism as Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell. For a time in the early 1920s they were the leading personalities of London’s immediately post-war modernist haut bohemia, and the embodiment of the modernist avant-garde as it was perceived in the popular imagination. One of the reasons for their disappearance from histories of the emergence of English modernism, is perhaps that the Sitwellian brand of avant-gardism was so distinct from the classicist aesthetic standard by which modernism would subsequently come to be defined. This chapter examines a cult of “ornamental modernism” in the 1920s, of which the Sitwells were the figureheads; an impulse that we find in works that embrace the extravagant, the theatrical, or the eccentric; that turn to the decadent, baroque, and rococo rather than the classical for their models, that foreground artistic celebrity rather than impersonality, and in which performance and façades dominate rather than formalist clean lines or the direct articulation of subjective consciousness. It is an alternative trend in experimental art that overtly positions itself in antagonism with the conservative artistic and cultural tendencies of the period, but that also sits awkwardly in relation to the standard and revisionary histories of avant-garde and modernist experiment, exemplifying instead an ornamental aesthetic that has been all but obliterated from subsequent literary and art history.

Gothic Futures

This chapter reconsiders Edith Sitwell’s only novel, I Live under a Black Sun, as Gothic fiction opening up a political reading of British colonialism and women’s labor. When read as citing and rewriting Gothic tropes, the earnest moralizing in the text becomes more nuanced. The ostensibly tidy allegorizing of the salvific power of Christian brotherly love is complicated by the eruption of disavowed sites of material and emotional labor that underwrites such a narrative. The chapter argues for the need to look at Sitwell as a thinker in her own right who dramatized her own strangeness as a way of critiquing the “normalcy” and mass politics around her. Gothic fiction tropes permitted her to offer a secret history of her historical moment, connecting her strangeness to a history of writers with whom she might feel professional kinship while emphasizing her own unique qualities. While she was not interested in feminist political action, Sitwell was concerned with problems of women’s labor in ways we might trace in other mid-century women’s writing that has been dismissed as apolitical or reactionary.

A Stranger’s Conversations with Life

Chapter 3 is a reflection on the theory and methodology of literary biography, based on the author’s experience of writing a life of Edith Sitwell whose autobiographical accounts are often not factual. For many years, literary biographers have placed their trust in a method akin to logical positivism – with an emphasis on recording obscure facts judged according to a true/false binary. Since many of Sitwell’s anecdotes (and those of other authors) are tall tales, parables of identity, or personal myths, their real value as evidence has been misunderstood. Many biographies fail to develop narratives, themes, or pathways of significance, and become instead enormous dumping grounds for undigested facts. The truth of biography, the chapter argues, lies in the interplay of carefully delineated personal, literary, social, and cultural narratives.

Introduction

The Many Façades of Edith Sitwell examines Sitwell through the lens of biography and autobiography, through the camera lens, and through the identity and work of the poet-scholar-critic. The contributors, leading scholars in Sitwell studies, explore her long, diverse career as a poet, critic, novelist, and celebrity. The essays in this volume reflect the idea that Sitwell was highly and deliberately self-fashioned: she was flamboyant, eccentric, ornate, and original. She set out to make herself a genius in the public imagination. The chapters make a case for the inextricably entwined nature of persona and poetry.

Edith Sitwell’s Critical Self-Doubling

Contrary to a long history of scholarship that considers Sitwell’s personality a major detriment to her historical and contemporary reception, this chapter understands Sitwell’s self-marketing strategy as genius critical self-doubling. To this end, Sitwell’s most important genre is criticism, in which she displays a penchant for often unattributed self-reference and self-explication. Sitwell doubles herself in her criticism, forging an arbitrary division between Sitwell the empirical critic and Sitwell the poet-philosopher; the empirical critic functions as a stand-in for the critico-literary institution, providing an “external” imprimatur for the poet-philosopher. Examining Noël Coward’s creation of Sitwell’s parodic poet-doppelgänger, Hernia Whittlebot, thus allows an understanding of Sitwell’s own self-doubling as integral to her self-marketing genius—Whittlebot’s relationship to Sitwell reenacts Sitwell’s approach to her own work. More broadly, these relations are a microcosm for the institution of modernist literary criticism that developed conterminously with the maturation and solidification of Sitwell’s strategies of authorship.

“Glittering like the wind”

This chapter examines Edith Sitwell’s relationship with other women writers of her time and the idea of “women’s writing.” Although often considered to be anti-feminist, Sitwell strove to articulate what she called a “female poetry” in the face of dismissal by male critics. This chapter argues that her intertextual dialogues with Algernon Swinburne, Gertrude Stein, and H.D. help to build an aesthetic practice outside the rigid masculinity of traditional modernism. From all three poets, Sitwell gleans both methodology, focused on the physicality of poetic language, and ideology, focused on representations of women’s voices. From Swinburne comes the romantic and doomed Sappho, from Stein the invisible wife “Sacred Emily,” and from H.D. the voice of lost-but-found Eurydice. However, in her intertextual responses to each of these, Sitwell also revises the work of the earlier writers. In Swinburne, Stein, and H.D. the poem represents the voice of the woman as lost. However, in Sitwell’s poetry, the very physical properties of words, rhyme, meter, assonance, and so on reinforce the idea that the voicing of the poem is always present.

Sitwell beyond the Semiotic

Reclaiming Edith Sitwell’s Façade as a central text of experimental modernism, this essay calls for cultural approaches that move her poetry beyond psycho-biographical interpretations. Ironically, Sitwell remained a marginal figure in women’s poetry during her feminist recovery in the 1990s. This wave of poststructuralist and psychoanalytic criticism often drew from Julia Kristeva to emphasize gender subversion. Pushing back against Sitwell’s outsider status, Bryant revisits the performance text of Façade in the contexts of race and empire. A complex interplay of parodic and imperialist meanings shapes Façade—a riotous text crucial in any account of modernism. Bryant also revisits the essay itself, considering Sitwell’s renewed status for a new generation of scholars.