Books: Cassandra from the Garden

THE SONG OF THE COLD (113 pp.)—Edith Sitwell— Vanguard ($2.75).

A CELEBRATION FOR EDITH SITWELL (144 pp.)—Edited by José Garcia Villa—New Directions ($1.50).

England’s fabulous Sitwells (Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell), now on a visit to the U.S.,* are fast becoming a contemporary legend. Brother Osbert has already distilled four bestselling books out of the way he remembers his father and the family’s idiosyncrasies. Now that Miss Sitwell’s recent poetry (as well as a series of critical tributes) is being published in America, U.S. readers can see for themselves why sister Edith has become one of England’s most highly regarded living poets.

Miss Sitwell’s earlier poems were hardly congenial to U.S. tastes. One critic thought of them as an artificial enchanted garden in which a rather nervous and overbred young lady trembled in a “trance of sensuous receptivity.” Though brilliantly done, her first poems were excessively, lushly contrived. But as her work developed, another Edith Sitwell emerged, sensitive to human waste and moral agonies. In a play fragment which suggests something of Greek tragedy, she wrote such grandly simple lines as these:

I bare men too, and then the old grey men,

The old grey hungry men said one word “war”—

And wrung my children’s bodies dry of blood

And hid them in a hole lest I should kiss them.

We are so old we should be gone,—too old

To die, too weak to creep into the grave,

Two poor old women: for these strong young men

Have taken all the grave-room, and we’re left!

Edith Sitwell has left her enchanted garden and ventured into the streets of terror and the cities of hunger; no longer tweeting little lyrics, she curses and moans, loves and despairs—but never sneers.

The longest poem in these collections is Gold Coast Customs, which purports to be a description of cannibalistic Gold Coast Negroes of 100 years ago, but which one soon sees is a cry of horror at the evil which permeates human society. At its end Miss Sitwell utters one hope:

Yet the time will come

To the heart’s dark slum

When the rich man’s gold and the rich man’s wheat

Will grow in the street, that the starved may eat—

Miss Sitwell is not always successful in her new incantatory style. Sometimes her symbols (the Sun, Gold, and Blood for life; the Moon, the Bone, the Cold for death) become monotonous, and sometimes her apocalyptic tone leads her to speechmaking instead of to poetry.

* Osbert and Edith materialized in Manhattan last month, for a lecture tour. It was her first, his second appearance in the U.S.