NEW Eccentric Life

Als nächstes in unserer Reihe der großen Exzentriker beleuchten wir das Leben der Dichterin und Schriftstellerin Edith Sitwell. Von PAUL WHEATLEY

English writer and poet Edith Sitwell

Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness,” wrote Edith Sitwell. And of herself she said, “I am not eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.”

Despite this, Sitwell is lovingly remembered as one of the most famous eccentrics of the English-speaking world. She even wrote a humorous book on the topic: English Eccentrics.

Edith was born in northern England, to a wealthy family. Her father, George, was known for his strange behaviour — he wrote a history of the fork and invented a gun for shooting wasps.

Edith’s childhood was unhappy. The family moved a good deal and she felt unloved by her mother, who “made her childhood and youth a living hell”. She did have a good relationship with her brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell — both writers. For a time in the 1920s, the three were at the centre of a literary salon in London.

Sitwell herself was a talented poet. Full of symbolism and with references to nature, her poetry had a clear rhythm — she described her verse as “patterns in sound”. One of her best-known compositions, “Still Falls the Rain”, written in 1940 after the London Blitz, was put to music by the English composer Benjamin Britten.

Not only her poetry was original. Six feet tall (1.82 m) and with a long nose, she dressed in highly individual clothes that she had designed for her, and wore spectacular jewellery and unusual hats.

The Sitwells had beautiful homes, but there wasn’t much money for Edith. She showed no interest in marrying a rich man — she lived most of her adult life with her former governess — and poetry was not lucrative, so she began writing books, including two biographies of Queen Elizabeth I and one of Queen Victoria, and English Eccentrics, a collection of essays. Subtitled A Gallery of Weird and Wonderful Men and Women, it covered the lives of sportsmen, travellers, adventurers and alchemists.

By the second half of the 20th century, Sitwell’s verse was going out of fashion and her appearance and direct manner had begun to overshadow her writing. The critic F. R. Leavis wrote of Edith and her brothers: “The Sitwells belong to the history of publicity rather than of poetry.” It did not help that the poet was deeply insecure and would hit back at anyone who mocked her. She called Leavis “a tiresome, whining, pettifogging little pipsqueak”.

Sitwell liked to support young talent. She edited a collection of poems by war poet Wilfred Owen, who had been killed in 1918, and was encouraging of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

Today, Sitwell’s literary achievements have been recognized in two biographies and reprints of her work. To get a sense of this extraordinary woman, listen to her reading “Still Falls the Rain” at www. poetryarchive.org/poet/edith-sitwell